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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.
The AP/ReturnPath story is interesting, in that the actual number of messages that never see their intended recipients is probably even higher than 19%.
This wouldn't even begin to account for the number of messages filtered by larger companies, universities, and other entities that maintain their own spam-filtering and spam-blocking systems. It also wouldn't account for the growing number of individual end-users who are installing and using commercial or free spam-blocking software on their local machines. Anti-spam software isn't just for geeks anymore. According to download.com, the top 25 results for a search on "anti-spam" have been downloaded 2,493,051 times, in aggregate.
Well isn't that a good thing?
If you are an end user, and missing a message doesn't matter that much to you, then no. If you are a company using E-mail to communicate with your customers, but you aren't sending anything critical, then no.
If you miss the electronic notification from your bank, credit-card, or student loan company that your last payment is late, or the notification from your airline that your flight was cancelled, then it does matter.
And if your one of the,"oh, it can't be more than five or ten", companies in the world that is using E-mail as part of your business processes, whether for sales, marketing, customer service, CRM, purchase or account notifications, etc... well then, hell yeah it matters.
Things are probably going to get worse before they get better, but E-mail for business has so much potential that I can't but hope that we will solve this problem.
The facts have a liberal bias. --The Daily Show
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!
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.