Why Public Email Needs a Police Force

jfruhlinger writes "Those of us who had email addresses in the early days of the Internet age remember sending notes to webmaster email addresses to report malicious email behavior — and actually getting a response back. But today, a huge majority of mail comes from public services like Gmail or Yahoo mail, and getting anyone at those companies to take responsibility for abusive users is nearly impossible. 'If they could agree on a third-party service that could be the receptacle on a 24/7 basis for rapid account suspension, the 419 Fraud problem might dwindle down to a trickle quickly. It would take trust among the email providers to do this, but it would also alleviate big problems that law enforcement officials are usually unable to handle. Call them the email cops.'"

Comments

Re:If he gets his way, yes.

[Doctor_Jest]

I think we're getting entirely too concerned with protecting people from themselves. This is an innocuous method for protecting the morons, but there have been other proposals that are much more sinister (and not even remotely helpful to anyone but corporations and governments..)

The automated system sounds more palatable to people who hate the free speech that the internet gives certain demographics. :)