Canning spam without eating up real mail. Blacklists have become a key weapon in the war against unsolicited bulk e-mail, leading some companies to turn a blind eye when they toss out legitimate messages with the trash. [CNET News.com]
I don't understand the dogged persistence of spammers. If people don't want to receive spam, why try so hard to force it on them? I mean, some individuals are working so hard to stop the spam from coming into their own inboxes. If they work so hard, doesn't that mean that they really -- I mean really -- don't want it? So why do the spammers work equally as hard to send spam to those who really don't want it? And are the businesses who choose to advertise via spam so naive as to think that they will get a positive response from those who work so hard to not receive spam, and yet receive it anyway?
I expect that in the future, one technique for fighting spam will be to slow the delivery of spam. What if edge routers were set up to allow only so much outbound traffic on TCP port 25 before they start dropping IP packets? (Note: You could use a similar slowing technique at the application layer if you required all port 25 traffic to go to the ISPs mail server. At the application layer, it would be much simpler to implement.) The dropping of IP packets would cause the TCP flow control mechanism to automatically slow the flow of outbound IP packets. The idea behind this, is that if spammers could send only 100,000 emails per day, it could really alleviate the spam problem. Now I must admit that I really don't like this idea. Why should edge routers have to bear the additional burden of filtering? But it appears that the age of innocence may be over as far as the Internet is concerned. Unscrupulous spammers have done their part to spoil it.
Posted by Doug Sauder at July 12, 2002 01:18 PM