> To get serious for a moment, I just wanted to make sure we are all talking > about the same thing. To me, "preventing spam" means stopping > spam before it > happens, not stopping my individual receipt of spam. In more > realistic terms, > it means reduction, not total elimination. > > Marjorie > [EMAIL PROTECTED]
How do you stop something before it happens? I know that's a phrase that is used a lot, I use it too sometimes... but it occurs to me that when we're dealing with humans, and sometimes deviant ones, there really is no such thing. When dealing with systems that all but guarantee anonymity, as the internet can and should be capable of doing IMHO, there will always be crackpots who want to run a scam, especially from overseas. (Nigeria Bank account scam comes to mind) So it is up to the ISP to stop it before it gets to be a problem, yet some ISP's are crackpots too. And there is no regulatory agency governing ISP's because there is no world government (amen). I know this sounds ludicrous, but at some point, semi-sentient programs will eventually have to be written that alert incoming mail ISP's to what is 'understood' to be spam. It will need to be continually 'trained' to detect new forms of spam, much like Anti-virus programs, which is a very good example of such a system. This does not mean viruses or spam will be eliminated, but there would be better systems in place to deal with it, and a global system of automatic alert/identification could be set up. How? Well... maybe Symantec, and McAfee would be good role models to follow for now, since they are doing the best job of intercepting viruses available. I wonder if they would be interested in taking up that cause, paid for by responsible ISP's. If there was money involved, I'm sure they would. That *still* does not solve the problem of getting it sent in the first place, but would it stop it from propagating through networks further? Earthlink has "Spaminator", I get 5 - 6 messages/day from "Network Commerce" that gets trashed before I see it, I suspect these are flagged spam, since I get very little spam these days! But that only solves a problem for me personally. _______________________________________________ spamcon-general mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.spamcon.org/mailman/listinfo/spamcon-general#subscribers Subscribe, unsubscribe, etc: Use the URL above or send "help" in body of message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Contact administrator: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
