use Perl

• Spam is not email (Score:2)

  by rafael (2125)

  Suppressing email won't suppress spamming. As long as you have publicly available contact information, allowing people you don't know to leave you a message directly and cheaply, you will get spammed, no matter what the media is. The only way to cut it down is to make it expensive (in time, space, CPU or money) to send bulk messages.
  • Re:Spam is not email (Score:2)

    by pudge (1)

    The only way to cut it down is to make it expensive (in time, space, CPU or money) to send bulk messages.
    
    If you are talking about pay-to-send email, then that will effectively kill email as a killer app. Kill email to save it? I think not.
    • Re:Spam is not email (Score:2)

      by rafael (2125)

      "Expensive" has many meanings. I a spammer has to deploy huge resources in CPU or connectivity to send thousands of messages, spamming won't be an effective business anymore. It works with the current model of email because all the difficult work is done by the mail relays -- they work out which messages are deliverable or not, they route them, they bounce them, etc. etc. but the spammer may as well stick random characters in his To: and From: fields. Impose some constraint on those fields and spamming will
      • Re:Spam is not email (Score:2)

        by pudge (1) on 2003.09.04 10:39 (#23851) Homepage Journal

        Yes, I am all in favor of making it harder/more expensive. I am just unwilling to extend that to an actual bill for sending email for normal users, even if it is only a "small amount," which is, in my experience, normally what people mean when they talk about making email "expensive" for spammers.
        
        Also -- not that I feel bad for these people -- but who is going to pay the bill for virus spams, if we have pay-to-send email? People who are unwittingly sending out thousands of emails a day are not going to want to pay, Microsoft is not going to want to pay, and the ISPs are not going to want to pay ...
        
        Anyway, yeah, putting significant constraints on what can be in the From: (and like) fields, doing authentication of servers, all these things will, once set up on the ISP end, be transparent to the users, but will be significant blocks to spammers. Will it solve the problem entirely? Of course not. But I am getting over 1000 spams PER DAY on some days (including yesterday, where I received 1200 total emails, and about 100 of them were not spam), and averaging right now maybe 800 spams a day.
        
        I do not want a complete solution, I do not want a solution that can't be worked around, because -- apart from the apparent truth that it is not possible -- I would be quite pleased with simply significant relief, rather than complete relief.

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        • Re:Spam is not email (Score:2)

          by rafael (2125)

          OTOH if spamming via mail becomes less effective, will this open the door to comment spam [incutio.com] ?
          • Re:Spam is not email (Score:2)

            by pudge (1)

            Yes. But that is easier to control, on a given site. For Slash, we could add a Spam moderation reason, and use Bayesian analysis -- once those moderations are meta-moderated to be Fair -- to recognize future Spam comments.