ptomblin's Journal: SPAM

Last night I was in a meeting of the officers of my flying club. There are 5 of us. Twice during that meeting, somebody mentioned either not getting an email, or getting it late because of their spam filters.

This makes me fucking angry. Spammers have reduced the utility of this wonder tool we've build to the point where it's nearly gone from being the best way of communicating with people to nearly the worst way.

I know I'm more "out there" on the net than most people - I own several domains, run several web sites, have several thousand posts with my current email archived on Google, am quoted on numerous web sites, use my own email address when contacting companies and ordering on-line, etc. Oh, and my kids took a while to get weened off of the "electronic greeting card" scam. So I expect a lot of spam. And the spammers don't disappoint - I average 600-900 spams a day caught in my three levels of spam filter.

But these people talking are NOT way out there on the net. Just a couple of anonymous pilots who don't even post to Usenet. And they are losing mail because they've had to filter so agressively in order to get *any* utility from their email.

That sucks. And something has to be done. The first thing that needs to be done is that spam merchants need to be visited by Narn Bat Squads. Second is that "legit" companies that spam have to be told how much business they are losing, so they aren't tempted to do it. Third is that email has to be replaced or supplemented with a protocol that is tracable and unforgeable. That would help the Narn Bat Squads find the spammers.