Legal Action Won't Stop Spam

It's profitable, and usually people don't get caught. This kind of all or nothing approach to law enforcement can certainly curtail both supply and demand, but not totally extinguish it.

There is no end to the number of companies that will pay for profitable marketing with little concern to its legality. As someone who runs a company, I know this. Any advertising campaign which is profitable gets funded to the extent which will maximize returns.

While major corporations can't afford to sully their images' by engaging in dirt-bag level marketing techniques, there are thousands of other businesses which have no such image to worry about. They are far more concerned with driving customers to their websites than developing their brand.

The risk to the actual advertiser in a spam campaign is trivial. To date, I'm not aware of any federal law that prohibits hiring a third-party to engage in an email advertising that subsequently turns out to be illegal. When you consider that many of the entities in question are based internationally, and not governed by U.S. law, the problem becomes even greater.

Automated spam utilities can help substantially, but will never fully spam-proof anyone's inbox. Rumor has it, many well-to-do executives employ actual human beings to hand-filter every message that is addressed to them. Presumably, this results in a near 100% accuracy, at least to the extent which humans aren't fallible.

As filters tighten, spammers get ever more innovative in ways to trick them. The value of a message that slips, "under the radar" is infinitely higher than one that gets blocked. As the last few ISP's who haven't deployed filters to date upgrade their servers, unwanted mail that's obviously spam will lose its last few readers, and the percentage of highly obfuscated spam will sky-rocket.

The only way to permanently solve this problem is to inherently change the way email works. Protocols need to be developed that don't let people arbitrarily send out 140,000 emails per hour from a single system. The recent development of massive armies of hacked systems sending spam further complicates things.

As a matter of policy SpamButcher does not engage in sending junk email. The irony of other spam remover applications advertising via unsolicited email is beyond painful. As a case in point, we found out that one member of our affiliate program was involved in sending spam. They weren't directly using spam to promote the product, but it their behavior was highly concerning. We booted them immediately, and have ceased active promotion of the affiliate program since then.

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