Any Hope Against Spam?

Year by year the spam problem seems to get worse. Hundreds of different solutions to prevent spam email have been suggested. Would any really work?

Being illegal isn't enough. Spammers already break the law regularly when sending their junk email spam. Sometimes it's as blatant as using other people's hacked computers to send their trash.

There are a few interesting possibilities - unfortunately they violate what I like to call the, "if everyone" rule.

If a proposed solution requires "everyone" to adopt it in order for it to work, it's not quite a real solution. This is because everyone will not engage in the required actions.

It's almost as useful as stating, "if only monkeys were to fly out of my butt."

If everyone where to deploy effective e-mail filters, nearly 98% of spam would be blocked. This would make it up to 50 times less profitable to spam. This might be enough to discourage the large majority of spam from being sent. But this won't happen.

If all the different ISPs were to adopt a zero-tolerance policy on unwanted commercial email, we wouldn't have a spam problem either. But this won't happen. ISP's want to make money just like everyone else. Since most ISP's don't host spammers, it creates a strong vertical market for those who do.

If everyone were to use software that required users pay them a small amount ($.02 or so) to receive email from them - that would make spam unprofitable also. Finally - spam free email! Ok, so who's first? I'm not going to bounce that email with the job offer.

So, from a practical standpoint it probably makes the most sense to focus on your own problems with unwanted email. The problem as a whole isn't going away anytime soon.

SpamButcher can be used as a spam filter for Outlook Express and other popular email clients.

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