Spam Bits

Let's mush a few things together into a nice pink rectangular solid: ipandithurts writes "The FTC Chair Timothy Muris doubts the ability of the "CAN SPAM" law to stop SPAM." ElementCDN writes "The Ottawa Citizen has a story on Bernard Balan the King of Spam. Bernard has closed up shop and moved to cottage country near Huntsville, Ontario." CactusMan writes "CTV (among others) is reporting that a Ontario trio has been named in a suit filed by Yahoo under the new CAN-SPAM legislation. Yahoo is claiming that the father and two sons were 'responsible for sending millions of unsolicited messages to users of the company's e-mail service.'" ilsa writes "According to this AP article, as much as 19% of e-mail sent by commercial entities never reaches its destination. 'Promotions and greeting cards were the types of messages most likely to disappear, the study found.' Although this study may have been intended to be alarming, forgive me for thinking this may not be a bad thing." Reader chrisbtoo responds to an earlier spam story: "In today's story about Spam solutions, monstroyer challenged people to crack the Spam Interceptor Captcha. Turns out it was pretty easy." Finally, we can't fail to mention an attempt at making the world's largest spam musubi.

Comments

Re:Wow, they requested this?

[squiggleslash]

Set up an email address for each entity you do business with, and this becomes possible and easy to control. There are some entities I do like to receive newsletters etc from on a regular basis, simply because I buy enough from them for it to matter and they've put a lot of work into making them relevent - Amazon.com is one that springs to mind. People I know subscribe to things like newsletters from airlines that highlight specials, as another example.

You know, if ISPs made it easier to implement this particular solution, rather than requiring we run our own email servers to do it (or even doing what they can to prevent us from running our own incoming email servers - many ISPs block *incoming* port 25) the spam nuisance would end overnight. Businesses would stop selling email addresses because they know that their ability to contact you stops the moment they do, and people wouldn't buy them because they'd know the email addresses are blocked immediately on receiving the first spam.

I note Yahoo! is implementing such a scheme. More power to 'em!