Box of Meat

ComputerworldUK: Is This the Solution to Spam?

Glyn Moody wants government agencies to send more spam to everyone, and then educate the few fools who respond.

Glyn, your idea advocates a legislative approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected, and users of email will not put up with it.  Specifically, your plan fails to account for the lack of centrally controlling authority for email; jurisdictional problems; extreme profitability of spam; joe jobs and/or identity theft; technically illiterate politicians; and most of all bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering — or by education of the few.

And, the following philosophical objections also apply: ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical; countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks; countermeasures must work if phased in gradually; and feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem. Furthermore, sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work.

And finally, quoting Spock: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.  You’re talking about sending more spam to everyone in order to educate a tiny minority who repeatedly prove themselves ineducatable.

Nice to see someone thinking creatively, though.  Go back and think on it some more.

3 February 2009
7:58

Box of Meat