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Source link: http://archive.mises.org/1639/combating-spam-public-or-private/

Combating Spam – Public or Private?

February 28, 2004 by

While Congress is debating the “best” way to regulate spam the private market is developing its own means of doing so. See this CNN.com article on the current state of these private solutions.

{ 3 comments }

Paul D February 28, 2004 at 5:21 pm

Both sides quoted here totally miss the point.

On the legal side, some states (like Washington) have laws now that make it easy to go after spammers for any citizen who takes the trouble. I’ve heard of people making a great deal of money suing spammers for $500 per email they receive. The new steps clueless Congressmen are taking pre-empt state laws and are generally ineffective, making things actually easier for spammers. See any of a dozen Slashdot articles on why the CAN-SPAM act doesn’t work (but it has an apropos name). However, the legal aspect is still beside the point.

On the technical side, AOL or Microsoft trying to break the tried-and-true mail protocol (SMTP) is no solution either. Many Internet users can no longer send mail to AOL customers; how is that an improvement?

The fact is, all spam can already be stopped – at the source, and at the user’s end – with two simple steps.

1. Stopping spam at the user’s end:
New Bayesian email filters, like the open source Spamassassin, use very successful statistical methods to identify spam with 99% certainty. I tried out one SA-based email program, called SAproxy (http://saproxy.bloomba.com/), and it caught at least 98% off the bat, and it improves as you “train” it. There’s a new generation of filters in development that are even more effective, if that’s possible. There’s really no reason for anyone to see spam in their mailboxes any more, nor is there any reason to whine to the government for ineffectual help.

2. Stopping spam from the source:
Most spam is sent from networks of Windows computers infected with Outlook viruses and trojans. Hundreds of thousands of clueless computer users don’t know their own machines are churning out spam night and day for professional spammers. The recent myDoom virus, which is still causing havoc, was designed to open back doors for just this kind of activity. It is a fact that if people just dumped Microsoft’s crappy products (especially the bug-ridden Outlook mail program), spam would drop 75% overnight. There are plenty of free and superior alternatives.

David Heinrich February 28, 2004 at 6:57 pm

Paul,

Despite that I agree with you on the problems with MS Outlook Express, people aren’t going to dump it, and asking for that is a non-starter. A better solution would be to license some portions of FS/OSS mail programs under the BSD license, allowing MS to incorporate those (core) parts to better their security.

Otto Drachen March 4, 2004 at 9:54 am

One solution for Spam would be to use the mathematical technique of Bayesian Filtering as explained by Lisp guru Paul Graham (http://www.paulgraham.com), which requires no goverment intervention at all, and works surprisingly well.

Another, nontechnical solution would be to charge the sender of e-mail, just as now is done for SMS (Small Message Service) for mobile phones in Europe. Imagine if a person has to pay $0.01 for each mail he sends, then a dayly batch of a million e-mail would cost him $10000 per day. Of course the question is how to prevent competitor ISPs from undercutting this by offering free e-mail services.

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