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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Kill Email 10 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • 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.
    • 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.
      • "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
        • 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 w
        • Have you read about Hashcash [hashcash.org]?

    • Actually, I find slash-style moderation to be the most effective method of separating wheat from chaff. I love slash message boards far more than email for communication, for this reason. There's all kinds of spam and trolls on slashdot, but I never see them because I browse at +4.

      --
      J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers
      • For informal discussion, slash has proven to be more effective than, say, Usenet. But I mainly use email for getting work done; that involves archiving, attachments (patches), search, classification, off-line availability, etc.

        On the other hand I read lots of perl.org mailing lists via NNTP -- the ones that I don't need to archive or search carefully. NNTP newsgroups, requiring some authentication to post, would be an effective replacement to SMTP mailing lists, if the From: header is carefully replaced by

        • Slash more effective than Usenet? Maybe for you, not for me. I still use Usenet every day, and I see little in the way of spam or other abuses. I find Usenet far easier to use than Slash-based websites. No doubt it depends to a large extent on the groups you read.
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