SendMail CTO Sounds Off On Spam and FTC

CowboyRobot writes "Eric Allman takes his well-deserved turn in commenting on the state of spam, the dark future, and the need for intervention. He calls spam an "arms race" where "in the long run everyone loses (except the arms dealers)." As you might imagine, he's on our side, and he does a good job of clearly describing the current state of spam, and the possible solutions."

Comments

That already exists.

[Alioth]

That already exists.

It's called the Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse (http://www.rhyolite.com/dcc). I use the DCC as part of my SpamAssassin configuration (sitewide, called by Exim) and around 85% of spam I receive is already listed in the DCC. The latest version (2.60) of SpamAssassin, plus the SBL plus the DCC works as a very effective shield. My JE (link in the sig) describes my recent experience with SA 2.60.

Re:I'm calling bullshit on this part:

[dazed-n-confused]

Examples, statistics please. No more anecdotes, no more gut feelings.

OK: here's a year-old ComputerWorld article documenting a study that did exactly that. Its title? Unsubscribing from spam counterproductive.

The best anecdote/example/statistic?

"We then set about religiously unsubscribing from the invitations sent to one of the addresses, but not those sent to the other. We've had it running for three weeks at date of writing and more than twice the volume of spam has come back to the 'unsubscribed' mailbox as to the untouched one."

So this study found that unsubscribing made spam volumes more than double.

Feeling better now?