Bob Crandell wrote: > I'm not for Screw The Establishment(TM). I am against government > involvement, of any kind.
The problem is that today, there is no penalty for spamming. If you successfully block one kind of spam, the spammer is free to try again to find a way around your block. That's fine for the spammer -- he's providing value for his customers with ever-harder-to-block messages. But it's not fine for you -- you waste a lot of time trying to block spam, your daughter wants to enlarge her penis, you can't find your legitimate email under the mountain of scams, and your ISP is struggling to provide bandwidth to handle all that spam. I have a friend who runs an ISP (other than EFN). He says 60% of his total bandwidth is spam. I don't doubt it. The problem isn't going to go away on its own. The volume of spam is increasing fast. The cost of spam is 99.9% borne by the recipient and his ISP. There's a tremendous demand, from both legitimate businesses and scam artists, for unlimited free advertising, no matter how low the sell-through rate is. There is no limit on how much spam we'll eventually see, unless we change the system somehow. But if there were a way to punish spammers, so that once they're caught sending spam they get hurt, the volume of spam would go down. Just like the volume of junk FAXes went down once there was a law that fined the sender. Punishment either comes from the government or from vigilantes. If you're so strongly opposed to any kind of government that you prefer vigilante justice, then we can agree to disagree. If you're saying that spam isn't a problem, or that it's a problem we can live with, or that there's a technical solution, then we have to keep arguing. IAAMOAC. -- Bob Miller K<bob> kbobsoft software consulting http://kbobsoft.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Eug-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
