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Is the CAN-SPAM Act Working?
DynaSoar writes "Lance Ulanoff of PCMag.com offer his opinion on the success, or lack thereof, of the CAN-SPAM Act. It doesn't appear to be working, though spammers have noticed, in that they try to make their spam look "legit". What might make a real difference, according to US Senator Conrad Burns, co-author of the bill, is international standards and enforcement."
It seems to be working about as well as the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs.
The only thing I have noticed is that spam to my junk Hotmail accounts has dropped to almost nothing. I think this is due to a change in MSN's filtering, and has nothing to do with the legislation.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
My Bayesian filters are starting to pick up on the snailmail addresses the compliant spams contain...
So maybe there was one minor positive point to the law after all. Unless they're simply fraudulent, it's a lot tougher to change a snailmail address than an email or URL address.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.
Now I start receiving spams that come with a nice big attached image which tells me that particular email is complied with the Can-Spam ACT.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
In actuality, a lot of spammers are located within the US. They only use remote facilities to mask their identities and cover up what they are doing. No, 'international enforcement' would not likely even have much of an effect either.
It's very simple, really. Make the sender pay for every message they send. How?
Simply reverse the email architecture on the 'net. Turn the current method of sending and receiving mail around. Instead of messages being immediately sent to the recipient's server, send the recipient a very tiny message saying that a message with this subject is waiting on the sender's computer for the recipient to pick up.
It would require a change in all the email software currently in use, and the only real hurdle that it provides is that people who are no longer on the Internet all the time can't send mail, but I'm sure someone would be willing to provide that service for a fee.
This would also make it much more difficult to forge headers on a mail, since you would need a valid IP address and/or domain name in order for anyone to get the actual mail that you wanted to send them.
Now, if you spam millions of people peddling whatever it is you're peddling, you'll be using very little bandwidth, a hundred or so bytes compared with several K, until those people come to pick up your message.
Furthermore, you won't be able to hide the originator of the mail nor would you have the problem of open relays spewing a constant stream of junk.
Couple this with PKI and you have a very flexible and very fair system.
The problem that I have with spam is that the current email architecture places 99% of the costs of email on the recipient. If you swing that around and make the spammers have their own, high end servers for handling the millions of mails that they want to send, then spamming will vanish in a hurry.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.