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Profile Of Spamhaus' Steve Linford
from the fighting-spam-all-day-long dept
The NY Times is running a nice profile of Steve Linford from Spamhaus, describing how his operation works. Spamhaus, unlike many other anti-spam lists, is very open about their process and are quick to respond to mistakes. Because of all this, of course, Spamhaus is constantly attacked, both on the technology side and legal side - which Linford says only shows that his approach is working to piss of spammers. A number of spammers quoted in the article give the usual quotes about how they're "just trying to make a living" or that Linford doesn't know what he's talking about. However, time and time again, Linford and Spamhaus have the reputation for being right about the spammers they peg. The real issue, though, is how do you stop the spammers? They just keep going further underground, and as hard as people like Linford try to track them down, the more difficult they are to find.
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Can't give up
One could say that criminal activities like murder or drug dealing are "driven further underground", but that does not mean we should stop police.
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sender pays
The real issue, though, is how do you stop the spammers?
Moving to a sender-pays email system is probably the only solution. Charging even just a penny per message/recipient would make almost all spam unprofitable. Most people probably send about the same amount of email that they receive, so their net cost would be close to zero. Mailing lists would have to start charging to recover the cost.
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Re: sender pays
I'd agree about payment...something more moderate...like 100 e-mails per month are free. and every other e-mail costs some money...maybe 0.1c...if not for one little thing - what about legal mailing lists? i for example get as many legal spam (that I agreed for and do not want to unsubscribe) as illigal (okey...more illigal...)...this one can be solved by better authentication....
I suggest better way: break internet in zones...u have to pay to be in one of the zones...this is good old idea about localizing this gloabl thing...which of course defeets the purpose
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Re: sender pays
Moving to a sender-pays email system
Ok, as you've thought this out:
1) Who will pay the bills of people on e-mail lists like amavisd, Freebsd.* debian.* linux.*? Some of these people make 100+ posts a day trying to help others. Now you want them to pay MORE money just so they can give 'the world' $0 software?
2) Who's collecting the money, verifying the sends?
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I already PAY for email
It's part of my web service package!
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