Can Spam Act Celebrates Five Years Of Ineffectiveness Though it did result in a few high-profile busts... How time flies! It seems like only yesterday we were saying that the newly proposed Can Spam Act would do very little to actually stop spam, and would wind up making "legit" spam worse. It's now been five years since the Act's creation, and spam volume has seen a ten-fold increase. Network World looks back at the Act's creation and concludes that while it did help in a few high-profile busts, the Act to this day isn't taken seriously be spammers. Many experts still think that the Act should make e-mail pitches of any kind "opt-in," an idea gutted from the original law due to pressure from marketing lobbyists.
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  TSI GabePremium,VIP
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| | Honestly... ...how much of a problem is spam? It is very rare that a spam message finds its way to my Gmail inbox or my work e-mail inbox. Spam filters are quite competent at catching 99% of spam that it has basically become a non-issue. | |
| | | | Re: Honestly... According to Cisco about 90% of all email is spam. So for every 1 email you get 9 were blocked as spam. Think of the time money and resources that must be used to deal with this problem. If nothing else think of how much faster the net would be if we got rid of all this crap. I say we kill all the spam filters for a month, including the ones for government. I bet something would be done then. | |
| | | | | Re: Honestly... A couple of years ago, our spam filter at work broke over the weekend. I signed in and saw about 500 messages in my inbox. Only about 20 were valid e-mails. The rest were spam. And this was years back. Nowadays, I'd probably have 5,000 spam e-mails for every 20 valid messages.
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|  SYNACKJust Firewall ItPremium,Mod
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| said by Hazy Arc:...how much of a problem is spam? It is very rare that a spam message finds its way to my Gmail inbox or my work e-mail inbox. Spam filters are quite competent at catching 99% of spam that it has basically become a non-issue. The problem with spam filtering is not the false negatives, but the false positives. Once in a while, I still get legitimate mail in my spam folder, so I still need to glance at its contents once in a while, even on gmail. Still, gmail filtering is stellar.  | |
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| | |  wifi4milezBig Russ, 1918 to 2008. Rest in Peace
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New York, NY | Re: Well, something will need to be done eventually.... said by Nightfall:Whats the solution here? Besides an overhaul of the email system OR implementing a new system, there is no easy solution. Any major overhaul will require a lot of money in retooling what everyone else has. Every mail server will need to be patched. This is just me thinking on the surface here. Until we make a change to the system itself, these problems won't go away. They will only get worse. The government's attempt to curb this problem did nothing. Bottom line, there is no easy answer to the SPAM problem.
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| | |  PacketeersPremium
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| Re: Well, something will need to be done eventually.... said by Nightfall:Bottom line, there is no easy answer to the SPAM problem. actually, there is... charge money to send every email. | |
| | | |  bentand IngaPremium
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| Re: Well, something will need to be done eventually.... said by Packeteers:said by Nightfall:Bottom line, there is no easy answer to the SPAM problem. actually, there is... charge money to send every email. SHHHH!! Don't give ISPs any bright ideas.
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| | | | | | said by Packeteers: actually, there is... charge money to send every email. And since a lot of spammers use hijacked machines to send their crap out, that will accomplish nothing. | |
| | | | | wifi4milezBig Russ, 1918 to 2008. Rest in Peace
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New York, NY | Re: Well, something will need to be done eventually.... said by TheWickerMan:said by Packeteers: actually, there is... charge money to send every email. And since a lot of spammers use hijacked machines to send their crap out, that will accomplish nothing. I think its the vast majority that do that. Charging per email will only be bothersome to legitimate users.
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| | | | | | | | Re: Well, something will need to be done eventually.... no charge for sending more then (insert number here) messages a second or smiler | |
| | | | | | | | | Re: Well, something will need to be done eventually.... So you don't charge people for sending more e-mail? Wouldn't that let spammers off the hook entirely?
Or maybe you meant no charge for sending less than X messages per second. In this case, the spammers will just space out their messages. Suppose I'm a spammer. I have a zombie network of 10,000 machines at my disposal. If I have each machine send out 1 spam message every minute over 8 hours, I've sent out 4.8 million messages. As my zombie network grows, I can send out even more spam messages without triggering the "e-mail charge" system. And if I do trigger it, what do I care? The people who would be paying would be the owners of the zombied systems, not me.
Then there's the whole question of who gets the money. Charging per e-mail is not the solution.
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| | | |  NightfallMy Goal Is To Deny YoursPremium,MVM
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| said by TheWickerMan:said by Packeteers: actually, there is... charge money to send every email. And since a lot of spammers use hijacked machines to send their crap out, that will accomplish nothing. In order to make a system like that work, there would need to be an overhaul of what we have now. Think about it, if we were to overhaul the system and put in one that required 1/10th of a penny to send an email, wouldn't it work pretty well? Thats since we are living in "what if" land. Since no overhaul is coming, it sounds like we are going to be dealing with spam for a long time. | |
| | | | | | | | Re: Well, something will need to be done eventually.... said by Nightfall: Think about it, if we were to overhaul the system and put in one that required 1/10th of a penny to send an email, wouldn't it work pretty well? How does that address the issue of spammers using hijacked machines? And that's not a "what if." That's something that's actually happening. | |
| | | | | | | NightfallMy Goal Is To Deny YoursPremium,MVM
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| Re: Well, something will need to be done eventually.... said by TheWickerMan:said by Nightfall: Think about it, if we were to overhaul the system and put in one that required 1/10th of a penny to send an email, wouldn't it work pretty well? How does that address the issue of spammers using hijacked machines? And that's not a "what if." That's something that's actually happening. With an overhaul of the system, it would mean that there would be no more hijacked machines. You would have some kind of secure login or other means of authentication. As I said here, just thinking outside the box. | |
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| | |  KrKHeavy Artillery For The Little GuyPremium
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| said by Packeteers:actually, there is... charge money to send every email. Yeah, that will bankrupt a bunch of Mom and Pops and those who aren't computer savvy.
Most SPAM is sent by zombie relay machines--- PC's owned by viruses, trojans, and the like.
Result of your system would actually make SPAM more profitable then legitimate email marketing, and the users would be stuck with being banned for life from broadband because they owe thousands of $$$$ in bills due to robo-spam.
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| | | | NightfallMy Goal Is To Deny YoursPremium,MVM
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| said by Packeteers:said by Nightfall:Bottom line, there is no easy answer to the SPAM problem. actually, there is... charge money to send every email. I like the idea that was brought up once before. To charge 1/10th of a penny to send an email. The people who spam would have to pay a ton of money to do it. Once again though, it would require an overhaul of the current system. That is something a lot of people don't want to do. They want the same open system but no spam. That just isn't going to happen. | |
| | | |  tschmidtPremium,MVM
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| said by Packeteers:said by Nightfall:Bottom line, there is no easy answer to the SPAM problem. actually, there is... charge money to send every email. I recommend a "follow the money." Spammers spam because there is money to be made. Rather go after spammer directly go after the company's making the products spammers are hawking.
/tom | |
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| | | CAN-SPAM wasn't designed to eliminate spam; it was designed to merely establish guidelines to be followed by those who send it. And that's all it's done. Those "high profile" cases were about spammers who violated the 'restrictions' (and I use the term loosely). As was said, making ALL spam opt-in would be a great first step. (Yeah, that'll happen.) | |
| | | | | Re: Well, something will need to be done eventually.... The problem with those guidelines is that spammers by and large don't follow them. Every so often, the government will trot out a spammer to make an example of them, but ten other spammers rise to take his place. The government threatens fines and the spammers collectively shrug their shoulders. Many are overseas and thus outside of US jurisdiction. CAN-SPAM has been a complete failure.
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1 edit | Re: Well, something will need to be done eventually.... said by Jason Levine:...CAN-SPAM has been a complete failure. except for legitimizing a large percentage of spam (failure of design or failure of purpose? I wonder). I guess you could classify them as "spammers", versus the "scammers" who don't follow the guidelines (the ones who use bots/botnets to spew forth their crap into the world, the ones with no accountability for whom charging real money for sending email would have no effect whatsoever)--but they aren't even located in the U.S. (for the most part), so CAN-SPAM can't even touch them.
What a wicked web we weave. | |
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| | Spam: A real boon... to all of the companies that sell anti-spam tools for commercial/business organizations, universities, govt. entities, etc. I wonder... would they lobby to eliminate spam now? (even if our govt. representatives were listening to "the people"?)
Yes, you Can Spam... all you want to. | |
| | | LOL at article title | |
| | | Some success SPAM is a crime and I feel buying software to block it just ignores the crime. I fight it first-hand: I wrote a program that stores the delivering IP address in a database; another program captures from my logs the IP addresses blocked by Spamhaus; once a week, another program generates Cisco ACLs for blocking ranges of addresses. Blocking key ranges makes a huge dent in the SPAM I receive.
To answer the person who asks if SPAM filters have made SPAM a non-issue, SPAM still consumes a lot of the bandwidth all of us are paying for, and it consumes server resources (plus power, space, hardware, software, support).
I'd like to know exactly why the opposite of Spamhaus - a list of known good e-mail servers - never went forward.
I'd like to see the US - the world's largest SPAMmer - require that ISPs include in Whois certain details about how their IP ranges are used. If a pool is strictly dial-up, or is used for DHCP, any mail delivered from those IPs could not be from a legitimate mail server and could be blocked.
Unlike Spamhaus, I never remove an address from my filters. I think that if this became common, the ISPs would not find customers for these tainted addresses when the SPAMmers released them. Then they'd find a solution to the SPAM problem pretty quick. | |
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That will make Can-Spam look like a winner....
