Slashdot Mirror
CAN-SPAM Is A Bust
Doc Ruby writes "The Congressional chatter about 'canning spam', in the CAN-SPAM law since January, has turned out to really mean 'they can still spam'. TechWeb News reports that 'In July, compliance fell for the first time under one percent to a measly 0.54 percent', from its 3% max. The researchers claim the ball has been dropped by 'law enforcement'. Those police are probably too busy deleting the 80% spam from their email, like everyone else."
I run a small home server off my cable modem for myself only - no big commercial operation. Been doing this for about 5 years or so... finally gave up last week after my spam flow increased from ~100/day up to ~100,000 (yes, one hundred thousand) per week in the past month or so.... Tried RBL's, Razor, SpamAssassin, DSPAM, Apple's Mail.app client.... stuff only helped so much. Constanting having to fine-tweak filters, re-train Bayes. It's too much of a hassle. Now I've given up. Set Postfix to forward all my mail to my Gmail account. Has helped quite a bit, plus when I do get a message that makes it into my Inbox, Gmail's UI makes it pretty easy to mark it as spam. I'll try this for a while.
...they complain about the 0.2% that make it past the filters and blocklists to them. With the current growth, sooner or later it is going to collapse as even the 0.2% overflow their inboxes.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
They do use money and time to catch real criminals....unfortunately society has deemed pot smokers and speeders 'real criminals'.
I really think my tax dollors could be spent on something better..like maybe giving it back to me.
I don't want to hear any more right-wing whining about getting tax dollars back until the federal debt is paid down. I don't want my taxes to be wasted to pay for interest on a debt accrued largely by fiscally irresponsible Republicans like Reagan, Bush, and the younger Bush.
spam is a techinical problem that can be solved through technical means.
THEN FUCKING SOLVE IT ALREADY! We've had this problem for a decade and people like you keep saying that technology can solve it. So invent the technology, get support for it, get it deployed, and solve the problem. You're watching people drown in spam and you keep telling us that the government should do nothing because you're planning to pull a technical solution out of your ass. Some day.
Anything else is just an excuse to have government regulate computer use.
I think that the government should regulate computer use so that idiot conspiracy theories like yours don't waste bandwidth and storage on the net.
2. The can spam law requires law enforcement to track down spammers. Honestly - does anyone think Johnny Law is going to be going through those mail headers looking for the true source of spam? Lets be honest, the first chinese IP and they quit.
The problem is that the most famous spammers, the ones responsible for the majority of the spam, make absolutely no attempt to hide what they are doing. Hell, if they prosecuted Alan Ralsky (who even slashdot readers managed to pin down a while ago, without access to many resources the police would have) then there would be a dramatic message sent to the spammers. Ralsky has given numerous interviews and has admitted what he does repeatedly yet he still walks free. Why?
(oh, and a google search will show you that, at least last year, only 6% of spam is Chinese , 58% was American...)