Anti-Spam Law - Will It...?

All the industry giants are lobbyin' congress to enact some laws to stop spam.

Can Spam be stoped? ...Reduced?

What say you?

Spam is ultimately traceable and if it was illegal then police could take action, and spam would be history.

It IS a form of harrassment after all. They just need a more specific law that states it.

Laws are specific to Countries - will that work for off-shore spammers?

Proposed bill:
All email software must have a 'Unwanted' button or option for emails that sends the sender and timestamp of the email to a federal database. Any sender who recieves 10 unwanted reports within a 24 hour period is sentanced to death.



I know that after that I'm only sending 8 emails a day. (Save 1 for an emergency).

I like the death sentence method. This is actually very similar to the method I wanted to use awhile back when I started getting really annoying spam. There's a thread I started here somewhere...

But yea... as long as it's a painful death, I'm for it.

Ouch!

Death?

You're americans. If people don't like your anti-spam laws, conquer them and set up a puppet government.


Otherwise just ban all emails from that country.

Isn't spam comparable to junk mail we get through snail mail? To me it's the same thing.

Spam makes me feel warm inside though..
Everytime I see 20-30 e-mails in my account I feel wanted! And nothing feels better than knowing that someone out there really wants me to save on my insurance charges, visit tasteful sites on beastiality, and enlarge my (insert random body part).

j/k

Snikers at Xedeus and tip toes back out of the thread

Please, the rest of the world hates spam. It wouldn't be in our best interest to do something any other country would support.

Xavier

Spam has done two things:

1.) Made email quite useless to me. I rarely use email to contact people, mostly I use IM's.

2.) Made me actualy have to do something everyday. If it wasn't for spam I wouldn't have to spend 10 minutes+ going through deleting them all.

So its a mixed bag... also they have provided countless hours of humor "We fatten up your hotdog!" was one of my favorites. Double meaning woo!

I remember when email was actualy usefull and when I wouldn't have 100+ emails a day. *gasp*

I could just get a new address, but I've had the same ones for about 5 years now and refuse to change them.

So yes I would go for an anti-spam law... I would go with the bounty hunter one, where they put bounties out on spamers.

Spam is similar to junk mail, but there's at least one BIG difference which is causing it to be a problem: it's practically free to send! Junk mail isn't...

You can send out a million, 5 million, etc emails for a few hundred dollars. And if even .1% of your 5 million respond, that's 5000 sales. If .01% respond you still get 500 sales...if you're selling something that you make say $10 off of every sale, you're +5000 and -800 or whatever the price was to send the mails. And that's with .01 of a percent responding... .001 of the emails sent. So you can see how it's worth it from their perspective, depending on who you're talking about of course.

Then there's the targeted mails where they would send stuff only to people who have expressed interest in similar types of products. I think the actual response rate is much better than .01% for those, heh. Actually if I remember correctly the response rate for even non targeted mails tends to be much much higher, depending on what you're selling.

I have to say that Yahoo does a decent job with their spam.

They shove most of it into a Bulk email folder that I can just scan rapidly to see if anything in there is worth saving (they unfortunately get a few false positives), then just hit a single link to delete it all. Any spam that manages to get into my Inbox I can just push a little checkmark by each message and hit a single button, and voila, not only is the email deleted, I'll probably never see another message like it again.

Yep Mole - Yahoo does have good spam protection.

Much better than my old HOTmail acct. which i dumped years ago.

Nigeria started cracking down on their fraudulent spammers after being threatened with having the entire nation blocked from the rest of the internet. Similar strategies will work if applied to Latvia, Romania and other spam havens.

How David does that work - the blocking of a country from the Internet?

I'm not sure how they do it but I do know that RoadRunner subscribers were totally cut off from email adresses in Russia for a few days last week and vice versa - so much spam was emanating from the .ru domains that the spam filtering hardware just blocked the whole country. Do that a few times and they will just start shooting spammers. I wish we could do the same here.

Start shooting spammers, yes, this is part of my universal spam free plan.

IP addresses are assigned to countries in blocks, as they need them. It is possible, although I don't know how easy, to find out which IP ranges belong to a certain country and to block those. Really I think it has to be done on a per ISP basis, but it can be done.