30 Mar
2002
30 Mar
'02
4:53 a.m.
Richard Erlacher wrote:
If enough folks simply block all emails from the
Yahoo.com domain, a lot of
SPAM will go away. It's the same for mindspring, Hotmail, MSN, AOL, etc. It
isn't convenient if you occasionally communicate with folks at these domains,
but it's the fact that they give away free webmail services for the asking
that makes them attractive origins for SPAM, since one cannot do any good by
blocking a single email address, thanks to the fact that spammers can get a
new email address for the asking, the only option is to isolate the commercial
domains that support SPAM in this way.
Sooner or later the forces of economics, thanks to the ridiculous consumption
of unpaid bandwidth by spammers, we're going to have to pay for our use of the
'net. The choice is between whether we pay for our own use or whether we pay
for the SPAM too. What's going to have to be sacrificed in the interest of
paying only for the traffic one generates rather than what one receives, is
the anonymity. If people who, ultimately, will be asked to pay for their use
of the infrastructure, insist that they are to be required to pay only for
what they transmit, as they do with the USPS-provided junk mail, for example,
they must insist that the genuine originator name and physical address, etc.
of the sender be incorportated in the email that's sent. Right now, the
SPAMmer spoofs a sender address. writes a single message with 6.23*10**23
destination addresses, and sends the thing, letting the intermediate routers
deal with the problem of distributing the message to each destination. This
costs him nothing, yet consumes a huge proportion of the bandwidth. If the
cost per bit were severely skewed, so that the guy sending 10 MB/month got his
service free, while the guy sending 10 MB/hour had to pay $100K per bit,
starting with the first bit, the use of that bandwidth would change. Now
that's extreme, but you get the picture.
Until senders (1) are prevented from sending a single message to multiple
destinations, and (2) are required to pay, say, 2**n! bucks per bit per month
for their bandwidth, we're all running the risk of having to pay for what we
receive as well as what we generate.
Think about it!
Dick
Jerome Fine replies:
While I agree with most of what Dick says, in the short
run I have found what may be a much easier solution.
By being prepared to change my e-mail address as frequently
as necessary, I now have the ability to completely block
spam except where it originates directly from a list membership
like with yahoo. And if that ever gets out of hand, I will
just stop subscribing to the "infected" list and change my
e-mail address again.
Up until the middle of March, 2002, the e-mail was getting
very annoying. Now it has been contained. And since I
had to change my ISP (and therefore my e-mail address
in any case), I took the opportunity.
Up until now, no one on this list has responded in public
although I have had a few private comments. I take this
to mean that changing one's e-mail address is considered
surrender, but is it really any different than a business or
person moving to a new address? I agree that I would
probably have been stubborn myself if the move had not
been forced due to the ISP change, but now that I have
made the switch, I must say that it was not as bad as I
thought it would be. I agree that some overlap with the
old e-mail address is needed, but after I canceled the two
most frequent lists (this one and one other), 90% of the
e-mail on the old e-mail address is now spam.
What I don't know is what the old ISP will do with the
spam once the old e-mail address is no longer valid.
If the e-mail gets bounced, will that eventually result
in the spam being discontinued or will they just keep
on sending?
By the way, does everyone understand my "replacement"
paragraph at the end? Of course if everyone chose the
same replacement algorithm, then harvesting an e-mail
address would again be simple. But there must be many
such "replacement" methods that are just as simple.
If anyone wants feedback on how successful this method
is and how frequently I need to change, please ask?
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
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