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A Welcome Shift: Spam Now Constitutes Less Than Half of All Email
An anonymous reader writes: According to Symantec's latest Intelligence Report, spam has fallen to less than 50% of all email in June – a number we haven't seen in over a decade. Of all emails received by Symantec clients in June, junk emails only accounts for 49.7% down from 52.1% in April which shows a huge drop. Year over year, spam has decreased as well due to internet providers doing a better job at filtering and shutting down spam bots.
Is there such a thing as a spam filter for regular (paper) junk mail?
It's like some perverse life cycle - my paper recycling gets picked up, made into paper, which is then made into junk mail, which is then delivered, and unceremoniously dumped into my paper recycling without being read.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
The real fix is to charge for email. To send an email, have a 2 cent charge. 1 cent goes to the ISP, and the other to a governing and enforcement body -- the ePost Office.
Spammers right now send for almost free. If they had to pay two cents for each recipient, it would put most out of business.
And they'd have to leave a money trail, making it easier to find and bust them.
Table-ized A.I.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(X) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
(X) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
If you consider for a moment that quite a bit of spam comes from hacked accounts (because it's trivial to filter out spam sources that have broken MX records or are untrustworthy for other reasons), you might get an idea why it's NOT a good idea and who'd eventually foot that bill.
But hey, it may finally make people consider protecting against trojans relevant when it hits their wallet with four-five digits.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Hotmail/MSN/Outlook mail is well known for just not delivering lots of legitimate mail now. You may not see spam there, but you may not get mail from a friend who doesn't use common webmail like gmail or Yahoo. The mail does not even go to your junk/spam folders, and it does not get bounced to the sender. They just silently accept and delete incoming mail, without any notification.
I'd, personally, rather see spam getting through than email become a useless technology that fades away because people can't rely on it anymore.
Morphing Software
The other difference is that Yahoo and Google [sic and every other BP email provider] have locked down email so that legitimate email isn't getting delivered. Now other providers are following the same rules. When you block a lot of email, it never gets delivered.
There are certain people I just can't mail anymore.
Then implement SPF, DKIM and DMARC - it's not hard compared to correctly configuring a mail server. As a bonus halfwits with a spare 10 minutes won't be able to spoof your email address.
But until you do something other than complain you remain part of the problem instead of part of the solution.