Be can be shamrock alms

The title of this entry is the subject line from a piece of spam e-mail that I recieved today. I won’t go into what the e-mail was attempting to sell as it doesn’t matter anyway. What matters is that I have never done business with the sender of the e-mail, I never will purchase anything from the sender, and I have never bought or sold the item that was on sale in the e-mail. This is just one of the 150+ spam e-mail’s that I get per day.

I have heard interviews with admitted spammers, and they don’t see anything wrong at all with what they do. They don’t have a problem taking up millions of cycles of CPU time across the systems connected to the internet involved with sending that spam to you. They don’t care if you don’t want it, they don’t care if you try to block it. They will take whatever means are necessary for you to see that e-mail.

That is the reason for that strange title. That is the spammers attempt (successful) to get past your spam filters. Any spam that is sent to me has to get through two spam filters, one that is running on my ISP’s mail server, and the one that runs in my Mac’s e-mail software. Both of them are highly efficient filters, and they do trap 98% of the spam that heads my way. The problem is, why should I have to spend money on the software required to stop or filter this unwanted e-mail, instead of the spammer having to do anything at all.

There are solutions beginning to emerge out there on several fronts. There is a group of companies that are trying to create a “trusted sender” solution. This to me seems exactly like “white listing”. White listing is the method of only accepting e-mail from a source that you know, such as using your address list as a filter, and blocking all other e-mails. There are two big problems with this method. If someone I don’t know sends me a legitimate e-mail, it would get blocked, and I have to manually control the list. This once again puts the responsibility on me, not the spammer.

I don’t have the ultimate solution, but I think there is one somewhere. If the spammers have to do work, then the business will not be as lucrative as it is today. Additionally, people have to stop buying things from these e-mails. In some cases, it only takes 1 to 2% of the people that the e-mails were sent to buying the item for the spammer to make money. The only overhead they have is the cost of hardware, and the cost of obtaining lists of e-mails. They usually don’t have to pay for software, as there are free programs out there they can use.

So like most things if you vote with your dollars, the e-mail business will go bankrupt and fail. This would be the most effective means of stopping spam. The next time that the 1 - 2% of you out there recieve spam, don’t buy it.

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