"The Sunday Times" Anti Spam Campaign

[Worldlife]

From "Culture" - 'The Sunday Times' 1st December 2002

DOORS SIX-POINT ACTION PLAN

1 MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT complained to a select committee last summer that obscene spam was crowding out e-mail from their voters. They know now why they must urge the government to give teeth to the new EU law prohibiting specific kinds of spam

2 THE GOVERNMENT should give ISPs the power to fight back by suing spammers for damages. ISPs have the most to lose from spam — and the most to gain by fixing it.

3 SERVICE PROVIDERS should pursue customers who abuse their systems, and work with each other to stop the spammers abroad. The ISP Association should draw up a code of practice and make their members stick to it.

4 SOFTWARE MAKERS must improve antispam software, and fast. Filtering spam is good, but only masks the problem. Spam-spotting software must report what and who it has found back to the ISPs, so they can block further spams.

5 THE PUBLIC can campaign for a system of electronic postage stamps such as that proposed at www.camram.org. Each e-mail sent to a new address requires a few seconds of your computer’s time to create the stamp, making it impractical for mass-mailers.

6 EVERYONE should call for an independent watchdog to which we can all report spam, where prosecutions are co-ordinated and evidence against the most prolific spammers collated.

ANTISPAM SCHEMES

www.deersoft.com
SpamAssassin is the program the professionals run to fend off spam

www.spamcop.net
Report spam to this site, and it sends details to ISPs for blocking


The full article can be accessed on:-

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...493565,00.html

You may have to register first and one wonders if this will generate spam mail!

[world-of-adsl]

Just can not see spam getting any better.

[gem]

From The Register

We hate Spam (email your friends)
By Drew Cullen
Posted: 02/12/2002 at 15:34 GMT

Is it our imagination, or was there once a time, when life existed without unsolicited exhortations to visit bestiality web sites?

Spam is fast becoming the battle cry de nos jours - the biggest Internet rallying point since the last big Internet rallying point (take your pick from intrusive ads, intrusive filters, intrusive governments).

The perception for most is of exponential growth in spam, even for those of us without Hotmail accounts - were you getting Korean-language spams, say, a year ago? This is supported by a blizzard of surveys. It's getting to the stage when email as we know it will collapse under the weight of unsolicited, err, email. So says the founder of Sendmail.

And the Sunday Times which this week begins a campaign to wipe the scourge of spam from the face of the earth. Just like smallpox. The European Union has also banned spam, not that thas will have much effect on our inboxes when the law is enacted. According to most estimates, the overwhelming mass of spam is sent by just 100-150 merchants. These guys, mostly from the US ain't going to fold just because the EU says so.

The rising tide of Anti-Spam is reinforced by the security software companies, which know a good bandwagon when they see one.

Latest bandwagon jumper is Symantec, with a survey of 1,000 consumers and their attitude to spam, and a spam filter to flog (Norton Spam Alert, part of home software package Norton Internet Security 2003).

Guess what, they don't like it up'em. Spam is a "growing problem at home and work and is considered offensive, time-consuming, and difficult to control".

Thirty seven per cent of the respondents report receiving more than 100 spam emails a week at home and at work, while 63 per cent receive more than 50 spam messages a week. Around three-quarters (77 per cent) of those with children expressed various degrees of concern about their children reading spam; everyone just about say it places a burden on their time, with a quarter (24 per cent) saying that they take more than 20 minutes a day dealing with spam.

Come on guys, 20 minutes? Are you reading this stuff too (I am writing as someone who gets somewhere between 50-100 spams a day - and that's not including unsolicited press releases)?

The four biggest gripes about spam are: pornographic or otherwise inappropriate content; waste of time and waste of PC resource, which may sometimes be limited; and it's difficult to unsubscribe to (do NOT try to do this) or block, and it is unsolicited and unwanted.

So what is to be done? Karl Kreuger, of the SANS Institute, has written a good summary of the Spam Battle, complete with some commonsense advice, for "security-minded mail system administrators".

So not too practical for consumers, then. Aside from implementing spam filters and never, never replying to spam, punters need their ISPs to take a much more active stance against email. A few high-profile prosecutions would not come amiss either. ®

[silver]

Just can not see spam getting any better.

tell me abt it, I just keep being sent the same offers all the time

I think there's some good spam filtering s/w around that's free, I am not sure that ISP filtering wouldn't filter out some stuff you want to receive, but I guess most ppl can live with a few false positives..

I use popcorn and it only takes a few seconds to remove emails I don't want, prolly get 5 / 10 a day but am thinking of looking into some s/w to do most of them automaticially...

Sil

[Art_Garfunkel]

filtering at your end doesn't seem to me to be the long term answer since surely the point will come when your mailbox is full constantly and your own email will be bounced.
I am not too keen on ISP's filtering it. A few false positives sounds harmless, but some might be vital.

I much prefer the idea of prosecuting the spammers and maybe removing the problem or at least cutting it down to managable proportions.