Getting on Top of Spam Down Under

The Register is reporting that Australia has implemented a new industry code for the regulation of email with respect to spam. From the article: "Under the new code, internet service providers (ISPs) will bear some of the responsibility for helping fight spam. Service providers must offer spam-filtering options to their subscribers and advise them on how to best deal with and report the nuisance mail. ISPs will also be compelled to impose 'reasonable' limits on subscribers' sending email."

Comments

paid spam

[dotpavan]

How would this clash with the pay-for-spamming option by AOL?

Agh

[c0dedude]

What a stupid law. Why put enforcement on the ISP's? There aren't that many spammers, the key is to go after them with harsh penalties. The rest will wake up after a few test cases.

Hmm...

[jamesgamble]

So the law states that ISPs have to give consumers a choice on their spam protection. Does the law mention anything about if the ISPs can charge the customer for that option?

Should be running already

[fak3r]

Why wouldn't they have this running already? It would reduce wasted bandwith, and make users happier. ISPs should do their best, and let users know in case some crappy 'joke' fwd'd to 100s didn't get through. My suggestions: Graylisting Mailscanner ClamAV Bitdefender Spamassassin DCC checks This will help reduce things CONSIDERABLY - again, if I can do it at home, why can't an ISP have a dedicated FreeBSD box (or two) that just handle this step, and then pass it on IF it passes?

I was under the impression...

[irimi_00]

That United States spam laws are working really well. I was going to say why bash on the ISP's and just have tough criminal/civil penalties. I seldom get spam I have to sort through.

On the other hand these stats are interesting:
http://www.ciphertrust.com/resources/statistics/

They tell me a few things.

1. Don't use citibank.
2. We're not doing as well as it seems to me

Re:Hmm

[arivanov]

Dealing with lusers who have been quarantined costs much more than the actual cost of the uplink bandwidth of a DSL line. In addition to that in an ISP which does not do significant amounts of colocation the overall balance of traffic is towards incoming. As a result extra outgoing traffic is usually outright ignored.

So the economic driver to quarantine Typhoid Marries is simply not there. As a result the Telcos and access ISPs will continue not to care until the rest of the industry (banks, e-commerce, etc) buy enough congress(or MP)critters to force a regulatory regime through.

Personally I am all for the immediately quarantining utility customers on the first SPAM sent out and forcing the mandatory usage of relays. Same for DDOS, so on so fourth. And anyone who does not want to be subjected to this regime should simply pay an extra for not having it.

Re:ISP

[hedwards]

Personally, I still have my first email address from circa 1997. I have used it for a number of years on forms and I am sure that a google search would find numerous listings.

Right now I get approxamtely 10-15 spam messages a day. That is without any sort of blocking and is on the high end of what I generally get.

Surprisingly the majority of spam actually goes away if you unsubscribe from it at the bottom. I used to get 1500-2000 spam messages a week until I started unsubscribing.

I am currently trying out http://www.bluesecurity.com/ to see if that improves things even further.

Re:Hmm

[Punkrokkr]

I worked at an ISP for a while, we were attempting to implement some sort of spam filtering; yet our biggest problem was giving the users a choice. Why are there spammers? Why is spamming such a lucrative thing to do? Because somewhere there is some moron who wants the spam. That was our problem, we couldn't filter out all the spam because some of our customers wanted the spam. It took a bit for me to wrap my head around that one.