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Do you think receiving spam via e-mail is getting out of control? If so, what do you think should be done about spammers?
And do you think spammers will always find ways around anything that's set up to stop them?
Ha, take that! My post is now more than one line, adrianxw. :p
One liner post detected- Cruise virus XC2-65 dispatched!
Er, you're dispatching a virus to infect yourself, Adrian? Why bother? Rub it on some ActiveX, place it within 20 metres of an IE-based OS and it's job done. I spent my day playing with adware systems, just in case you're wondering :)
Personally, I think a nominal charge should be applied to all e-mails, if you're gonna peg it to US currency, 1 cent. This way, ISPs could take the money and re-invest it into improving the e-mail infrastructure so that sending an e-mail across the world really does take less than two seconds all the time. Ensuring that there are no SMTP servers left wide open for all to use would also discourage spamming, as well as ISPs e-mail servers back-checking "From:" addresses automatically, so that messages that seem to have originated from thin air go back to that state.
As for free e-mail providers such as Hotmail, perhaps they could use ads to fund their service? :p
Nice try. I think that the intelligence level on this board is high enough to realize that a person who switched two letters of a person's name around and is saying bad things is most likely NOT the actual person (exception: Series X4 1.0 :p)
Also, adrianxw, isn't that rather hypocritical?
>>> Also, adrianxw, isn't that rather hypocritical?
Sense of humour failure!
>>> a nominal charge should be applied to all e-mails
This is under consideration. 3-4 weeks back there was an article about it in New Scientist. The amount was small, (I think it was 0.01 cents US or of that order), not enough to inconveince normal users but enough to discourage mass mailing spammers.
AOL, MS and, errr, someone else big can't remember had stories on their sites also.
Damnit, adrianxw hijacked my thread with that virus thing.
Anyway, do you really think charging for e-mail will ever happen?
I'm sure "they" are looking at other solutions.
Maybe turn the infamous "please respond if you do not wish to receive further emails" question into a "please respond if you would like to receive further emails" question. Would that work? So... you may get a bunch emails from individual companies (no cheating by changing the "From:" line to hundreds of made-up people that is just really the same company/person, that is really really bad/illegal) and that is it, they can't do anything like sell your email address/name to others or send any further emails unless you do respond by clicking on a link to a website where you can click on a bunch of check boxes saying:
1) yes I would like to receive further info from your company
2) yes you can send my email address/name to others
If you say no, then if they ever send you something you sue their asses. Isn't this being done with telemarketers in some form?
Yes, there are laws that are made for telemarketers, but they just get fined if they violate them. I'm not sure about them getting sued.
I think any spam that is received that can be pointed to a company supplying the end-product should be fined. Then the next marketer they hire will not be a spammer (unless the fine is too small). This would cut the business to spammers making it much less attractive. Simply dry up the major portion of their market.
Granted this will not stop spam totally, but I'll bet it would cut it *way* down. No more Viagra ads!
>>> Damnit, adrianxw hijacked my thread with that virus thing.
Jeesh! You post a one liner under the title Spam!!! and I post a jokey reply. <fx="walking away shaking head voice getting quieter with distance"> I sometimes wonder why I bother with you lot I really do... </fx>
<fx="shout from distance">Look at this. </fx>
I think that the easiest would be this:
Flood all spammers - If everyone replied to EVERY spam message with a 2 megabyte picture of mating hippopotamusses, wouldn't the spammer's mailbox be filled to overflowing with crap?
If he sends out 1000 messages, that results in 2GB of crap for him to wade through.
Spam the #@$@#$ spammers!
Either that or boiling alive in hot oil as a warning to all the evil spammers out there!
Gus
That would have already been done if it wasn't for the fact that SMTP allows you to send messages without supplying a valid "From" or "Reply-To" address, thus you can't trace spammers (You could trace where they're spamming from if you had access to the logs of all the mail servers the spam passes through).
Clearly it wasn't the brightest of academics who thought up that system, although do you think they had predicted that the internet would become one giant ball of ads?
It's a little humorous to see someone with an avatar like that say those things. :pQuote:
Originally posted by GoodStuff
I think that the easiest would be this:
Flood all spammers - If everyone replied to EVERY spam message with a 2 megabyte picture of mating hippopotamusses, wouldn't the spammer's mailbox be filled to overflowing with crap?
If he sends out 1000 messages, that results in 2GB of crap for him to wade through.
Spam the #@$@#$ spammers!
Either that or boiling alive in hot oil as a warning to all the evil spammers out there!
Gus