[PLUG] Spam law update

[Bill Thoen]

Alex Daniloff wrote:
> 
> How would ISP's track spammers to charge them a money if
> most of the mail headers are spoofed anyway?

I don't know. But rather than give up and say it can't be done,
it would be more useful to consider how it *can* be done. It
would probably require a change in the e-mail protocol that would
treat an unknown message's status from "trusted until proven to
be spam" to "not trusted until proven legitimate." Spammers do it
for the money, so all we have to do is make it more expensive for
them to operate. Spammers are using our resources without paying
us, either directly or through lower access costs for us. By all
definitions they are stealing from us. 

I say put the squeeze on ISPs to figure something out because the
higher up the pipe you go the more concentrated the spam load is
with a better economy of scale in which to develop and implement
anti-spam techniques.

But I do know that if each us tries to independently filter spam
on the extreme downstream end, we will not ever be able to bring
enough concentration of pressure to bear on these spamming
parasites to wipe them off the face of the earth. They will
continue to improve their delivery throughput (because without
checks, that's the way the economic equation goes) and we will
all end up spending all our time trying to design better spam
filters and seeing our systems performance degrade under what
will eventually amount to a spam-fueled DDoS attack. I don't want
to have to spend all my time and money garrisoning and defending
a fortress; I want to have some fun with the internet too!

- Bill Thoen