[clue-talk] Triaging spam

[Charles Oriez]

At 06:55 PM 12/25/2004, Angelo Bertolli wrote:

>Well even though I think it's possible to stop most spam, I have to 
>disagree with him on this point:
>"If you hired someone to read your mail and discard the spam, they would 
>have little trouble doing it."
>
>I don't know if his philosophy depends on this, but unfortunately this 
>point probably only applies to most tech people who realize the harm of 
>ads.  For example, some of the clients I have email set up for actually 
>subscribe to things that look like spam.  And throwing those out (which I 
>did with the filter) is considered a false positive to them.  Even going 
>through by hand, I couldn't find which emails they were talking about as 
>being non-spam.  The problem is... there are people out there who like 
>what most of us would call spam.  And unfortunately, the definition of 
>spam is largely dependant on the receiver's opinion of the content.

I had this same arguement at a christmas eve party. spam is about consent, 
not content.  our arguement is over where consent came in.  If I order 
something online, and a message comes from the vendor 6 months later 
selling something not related to the transaction, and I was given no 
opportunity to deselect "spam me to hell and gone" boxes on the order page, 
I call that spam and report it as spam.  The federal can-spam act, and the 
guy i was arguing with, claim that I gave consent and it isn't spam.

solution is simple.  Backbone providers including MCI, AOL and MSN simply 
have to block port 80, as well as port 25, for any ISP they get spam 
complaints on.  no orders get placed. spam stops being financially viable, 
spam gets under control.  reason why this hasn't happened yet is also 
simple.  Go to http://spamhaus.org.uk and check out his top ten list of 
spam friendly providers.



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coriez at oriez.org 39  34' 34.4"N / 105 00' 06.3"W       AIM handle caoriez
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