03 February, 2010

Sorting out spam once and for all

Method 1:
People spam because there is a small percentage of people who buy from spam. Therefore the root cause of spam is that there are people who buy from spam. And it is always better to fix the cause rather than try and fix symptoms, so instead of going after the spammers they should go after the people who buy from spam. If the people who buy from spam stop buying from spam there is no benefit in sending spam.

So when people buy from spam they should be fined or something because they are doing bad stuff to affect the rest of the world's population. People will learn very quickly when they or other people start getting fined, they will quickly learn for themselves about buying from spam is a bad thing and therefore sending spam will start to dry up. Say for banking phising emails you lose all the money that you lost and then fined the same amount.

Method 2:
Another method that was working, so well in fact that a spam lord PharmaMaster said "Blue found the right solution to stop spam, and I can't let this continue" (Ref). The method basically boiled down to an automated tool which if you got a particular message and only once per message received filled out the order form on the site saying that you don't want spam. This really got the people paying the spammers to send spams for them pissed off because they had lots of fake order to trawl through, which increased the cost of doing business for no more orders. This system was the target of a DDoS attack and was forced to close down, as it was a single point of failure.

What needs to be done is and was started but never got anywhere was making a distributed system to do this with out the single point of failure. Given the DDoS power behind the spammers it will have to be done bitttorent, Google, etc type size. It has been said by spammers that this method works so it would be good to see if this method could be set up to work again.

Seeing they are saying that spam accounts for 90% of email traffic and it requires CPU time to accept email and then also do all the spam filtering processing. So if spam can be reduced it will help companies be more green as they can use less computers in their email infrastructure.

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