Outbound Spam

Anonymous Coward writes "It looks like a wholesale ISP who recently went out of business, Ziplink, was working on a solution to the problem of outbound spam. UnixReview has the article here. More information is available on the Ziplink web site here. It looks like they filed a patent on it too." The last paragraph of the article notes the free speech problems inherent in any system designed to limit who can communicate with whom.

Re:Right answer, wrong problem.

[Technician]

Right problem. A machine cranking out 5,000 messages taking up 15 seconds per person to scan and delete uses a total of 75000 seconds of business manpower resources. Scale this to 2,000,000 messages and tally the bill in manpower to the reciepent. That is over 8,000 hours of manpower wasted. I would like to bill the spamers for the resources used on the receiving end.

I believe all mail should be hand written and not mass duplicated that is intended to be read as an email letter.

I believe other info as ads and update information should be posted as a bulletin board item on the company web site and in online classifieds. It should be there so I can find it if I desire to look for it.

Re:There's already a cure for spam. Noone uses it

[Tumbleweed]

Are those procmail rules or something? Nicely done, if so - I wouldn't mind a copy of that.

You mentioned the big point, though - stopping it at the server level rescues bandwidth. That's the real deal - if it's stopped at the mail servers, then the spam industry goes away, and then we get back all that nice bandwidth. I certainly wouldn't mind XNS-enabled NNTP servers, either! That'd rescue about 80% of the traffic, from some figures I've read.

Unfortunately, this topic isn't showing up on the main page of Slashdot, and they've already rejected my submission of this as a news topic. Duh. Guess the Slashdot editors like spam or something. I'm going to have to find another place to post this that will get the attention of the open source developer community. Any suggestions?

The cool thing about open source software is that the kind of funcitonality you've set up in your mail filters can be set up in an open source mail server. I'll have to talk to some of my programmer buddies about adding this to postfix or something.

One can only hope that since MicroSoft is now getting interested in P3P, that more attention will be paid to P3P-enabling technologies like XNS.

Don't hang SPAMMERS!

[www.sorehands.com]

We allow /. users to cane them.

Right answer, wrong problem.

[human bean]

This limits messages over time, not spam. Two things:

1. This works only as long as the spammers are technically deficient. Email could start arriving from lots of different IP addresses and still be part of the same UCE stream.
2. Spam programs just get slower in order to match the rate. This increases the expense of the spam by requiring multiple connections and machines, etc., but not by much.

The good part of this is that spam is stopped near its point of origin, as opposed to being ignored after transmission and cost.

I still think the best solution is to simply hang a few of the fellows who spam, and we shall probably hear nothing more about it.

There's already a cure for spam. Noone uses it yet

[Tumbleweed]

See my post [slashdot.org] from a few days ago on the topic of XNS.

Re:There's already a cure for spam. Noone uses it

[human bean]

I like the idea.

The email rules I have set up are the following:
1. Allow email from my friends list.
2. All other email goes to spam list.
3. An automated reply is sent to emails in spam list.
4. Replies to my automated reply are allowed through.
5. Delete spam list once a week.

This is not as good as blocking at the source, however. I still have to pay to transport the spam.