>Regardless of how effective they might be - or might not, my experience is >mixed - they create additional work and expense for the recipient. I have to >buy the technology (or pay for it to be embedded in my mail software) and I >have to spend considerable time in setting up the software and making sure >it works properly.
This is true. Compare this to the time you now spend filtering, fighting spammers, dealing with spam, etc. Compare this to the expenses now currently billed to you by your ISP and others for all the work they do in dealing with spam. Both systems, the current one and white listing, involve inconvenience and expense. >They also make it difficult - impossible, if they're working correctly - for >individuals who I don't know to contact me. Not at all. Your white list app autoreplies replies to strangers, providing them a link to your web page form. Stranger clicks the link in the autoreply, then copy/paste their original message in to form. This inconvenience (to them not you) is the cost of actually having control of your own inbox. >Further, they don't do anything to stop the flow of spam that's taking up >more and more bandwidth - creating both real costs for us as individuals and >organizations, and impeding the operation of the net. If we were all white listing, who would the spammers spam to? >If we adopt white lists, that just gives spammers even greater cover >since they can argue that people who don't want it have an option to prevent >its receipt. If we adopt white lists, spammers will get zero return on their investment of time etc because no one will be seeing or responding to their messages. >I'd go so far as to say that white lists turn email and much of the Internet >on its head, simply so spammers can send spam. Yes, white listing does reverse the current paradigm. And spammers could continue sending spam, agreed. But in a white list world nobody would be receiving the spams. >If we really want to stop spam, we need to lobby for effective laws that >will put the cost - in the form of fines - back on the spammers. So the spammers move offshore. Who is going to enforce the fines then, the governments of Sudan, Thailand etc? >Legal action will be taken to eliminate spam - I'm surprised it hasn't >happened already, but the first congress person who gets enough complaints >about some of the filth passing through email is going to see this as a >great populist issue that will appeal to a wide swath of the electorate. The US Congress is impotent against spam because the spammers can simply move beyond it's jurisdiction. The Internet is global, right? >Recent history with government and technically oriented laws suggests that >we - and I mean all of us - won't be happy with the results. So, we can keep >having polite little philosophical debates like this, or we can actually do >something useful to educate lawmakers and lobby for meaningful laws. Or we can stop looking to somebody else to solve our problems and simply accept responsibility for defending our own mail box. Why give the government more power over our lives than it already has, unless it's really necessary? Phil _______________________________________________ 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]
