Fighting Spam with Filtering vs. Legal Action

Over the last few years countless governmental bodies have passed laws targeting spam. The success of these laws seems unclear. In contrast, those using antispam tools have consistently benefited from a reduced level of junk email.

The radical spam growth that occurred from 1999 to 2003 seems to be over. It's difficult to measure scientifically, but I've done enough research to say pretty safely that there's been a less than a 2-fold increase in the last 3 years. Getting too much more specific than that is difficult. The cause for the curtailment of growth is hard to determine. However, it is possible that legal actions have played a roll. Nearly all junk email is now illegal, and in a few cases anti-spam laws have been enforced. The threat of legal action increases the cost of spamming, which decreases its effectiveness to advertisers.

Users of e-mail filters benefit from having between 50% to up to 100% of their junk email filtered. The least effective systems are simply poor at blocking emails that are unwanted. The ones that catch all spam are generally based on challenge-response systems which incur expense on the sender by having to validate themselves. SpamButcher usually catches over 95% of spam without requiring a challenge-response process.

On the downside, many spam filters do suffer from periodic false-positives. The cost of these emails is hard to calculate.

One way or the other, end-users and system administrators acting as spam fighters have clearly killed much more spam by the deployment of filtering systems than any legal action has.

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