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Forty Years of Spam Email (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC has a video celebrating the 40th birthday of spam email. Here's a transcript of the video: "It is 40 years since the first spam email was sent. Marketer Gary Thuerk composed an email selling his company's newest computers and sent it to 400 users on ARPANET, which was the network that become the basis for the internet. Why is it called spam? It has been suggested that it was called spam after a song in a Monty Python sketch. Where patrons of a cafe were repeatedly offered something they didn't want. The concept of spam is nothing new. Unsolicited telegrams were sent over 100 years ago and we've come to accept junk mail as part of everyday life. Now [nearly 60%] of all email is spam. Like most rubbish, it can be found everywhere on earth."
In the another 40 years the problem will be astronomically worse. In fact if all we do is keep trying to filter out spam, the problem will almost certainly be unbeatable within another decade. The spammers know that they are slowly winning the war against the filters as the signal:noise ratio keeps coming down ever so slightly as they get a little more spam through with each iteration. They know that the complement to this is that more legitimate communication ends up getting automatically junked by the same filters, which means that eventually the filters stop being useful.
The only way to end this problem going forward is to finally look at spam for what it is. Spam is an economic problem. Spammers don't send you spam to make you mad or to waste your time. Spammers send you spam to make money, plain and simple. The only way to end it is to stop them from making money on it. You can't legislate it away by throwing arbitrary penalties at spammers - we've even heard of spammers being murdered on the street and it didn't stop more spammers from coming up to take their place. The only way to stop spam is to stop them from getting paid.
This has been shown effective before. We need to track down how they are getting paid - it most often is based on click-throughs so we need to find who owns the spamvertised domain - and interfere with it. If the money doesn't get to the spammer, they no longer have a reason to send spam.
Everything else is a waste of time, money, storage, more money, and more time.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.