Spam is Back With A Vengence

Ant writes "The Red Tape Chronicles reports that just last December (2006), the FTC published an optimistic state-of-spam report. It cites research indicating spam had leveled off or even dropped during the previous year. It now appears spammers had simply gone back to the drawing board. There's more spam now than ever before. In fact, there's twice as much spam now as opposed to this time last year. And the messages themselves are causing more trouble. About half of all spam sent now is "image spam," containing server-clogging pictures that are up to 10 times the size of traditional text spam. And most image spam is stock-related, pump-and-dump scams which can harm investors who don't even use e-mail. About one-third of all spam is stock spam now."

Comments

We need something New.

[Benaiah]

Email simply isnt working.
We need something new. Nuff said.

We register websites. You pay. You should have to pay to forward emails. Say 1c per email. And all the money taxed goes to me for thinking of the idea. I will have eliminated spam and become a billionaire! Everyone is happy!

1p per email

[zaax]

If 1p was changed per email with the 1st 30 free per day it would stop spam dead.

Stamps!

[Tablizer]

Spam will not go away until email is a fee-based service. Spam proliferates because it costs the sender only a few dollars to spam millions of people. If it was fee-based, even say 5-cents per message, then spammers would have to pay 50,000 to do that. If they used zombie machines, then the zombie owners would notice a bill for thousands of messages and fix their machine or abandon email. Of course it would not eliminate all junkmail, but a vast majority of it.