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

I like the idea

[Transient0]

of the do not spam registry that they mention in the article. But it seems like a real pipe dream considering how much trouble there has been getting the do-not-call registry up and running.

Also, most telemarketing is done from in-country because of LD charges. Not so with e-mail. It's pretty hard to enforce US laws on a Taiwan spamhaus.

Ah well, every little voice against spam warms me a little at least.

Re:I like the idea

[aborchers]

Even if most spam does currently originate in America, if the U.S. somehow passes and enforces an effective anti-spam law, there is effectively zero cost involved in these spammers moving there business out of the States and still spamming Americans.

As much as I find balkanizing the network to be philosophically repugnant, there is a second step that is not often discussed in the context of US legislation against spam.

Once spam is banned in the US, we (the network operators) have to block traffic from netblocks assigned to countries that are friendly to spam. The legitimate business and communications needs of those countries will then drive them to enact their own anti-spam policies to get off the block lists. If their only need for the network is to send spam, then they will soon find themselves isolated and ineffective.

I don't like it, but to me it looks more and more like the lesser of evils...

sorry, a gut feeling is good enough

[Schlemphfer]

You've asked for statistics, but this is a case where none are really needed. Logic is good enough. What you've asked for can't be all that easily studied. Harvesting email addresses from opt-out lists has to be about the sleaziest thing a spammer could do. And you'll agree that the sleaziest spammers forge headers. So, how on earth could you be 100% certain that your act of opting out has caused a given piece of spam?

All you can do is look at the spam industry itself, and ask, "why wouldn't they harvest opt-outs for future spamming?" By opting out, after all, you've just given proof that the email address in question is valuable to you. Why wouldn't they want to take advantage of that piece of information. Do you think spammers suddenly adopt scruples on this point? Given how unscrupulous spammers are in every other aspect of what they do, I think it's absurd to think they treat opt-out lists with any integrity.

That opt-out lists will be abused by spammers is common-sense. I think the burden of proof is on you to show otherwise.

Re:Sendmail is a Good Guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, at first you were just the usual whinging slashbot, repeating the "Sendmail is BAD" mantra that people who've never run major mailserver like to parrot. (With the usual complaints, which all sound like "Ford cars must be slow, because the Model T was slow, and they must all be broken, because the Ford Motor Co. has had recalls where they fixed cars for free".)

Then you mentioned "MS Exchange developers" in the same breath as Wietse Venema and Dan Berstein, and finished off by calling Allman a "suit".

You must be a troll, then! Or profoundly, phenomenally ignorant.

Person to person communication in the future

[Filik]

Darn, article got slashdotted before I could read it, so this reply is just general musings.

The spam problem has to do with the whole future of person to person communication, as well as the whole future of adverticement. Whichever way it will be solved, a very likely outcome is that in 10 years it will no longer be possible in any way to get in touch with someone you don't already know from outside the Internet, and the first decade of Internet will be looked back upon with nostalgia as the only decade of totally free communication. This is because the real problem lies in the initial contact.

You might argue that we can still communicate via boards, chat channels and similar things, where you can give out crypt-keys to those you wish to continue communicating with, but remember that these will be the next target for adverticing after open email collapses. I'm sure adverticers will even write AI's to simulate people so that they can lure the crypt-keys from innocents.

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?