What’s a really effective anti-spam tactic?
I agree with Eric Lee when he says that activists and trade unionists should be concerned about the spam problem. If email becomes unusable, we will be much less able to get our own message out, but the rich will still have ways of getting their own propaganda in front of the public.
Spamming, the sending of unsolicited bulk email, is quintessentially capitalistic: a public resource (the Internet) is used to produce private profit. Socialize the costs, privatize the profits—that’s what capitalism is all about. And for a small number of big spammers, it’s big business.
I don’t think that Lee’s suggeste tactics are all that likely to “actually work,” though, if we define a working tactic as one that reduces the total load of spam on the network. Filtering of spam after it arrives, whether at the server or the email client, does nothing to inconvenience the spammer. We, however, suffer even if we don’t have to read the spam: the network slows down, the mail server gets busier and slower, and eventually the monthly bill goes up to pay for increased capacity.
The concept of a multi-layered defense is a good one, though. The following defenses can all be used at once for real effectiveness:
- Boycott spammers. Never, ever buy anything that has been advertised via spam. Make sure your friends understand why they should do the same. Spam is no longer the sole province of sleazy pornographers—it’s used by sleazy mainstream businesses more and more. If they don’t get sales, they’ll quit spamming.
- Boycott the Internet service providers (ISPs) who harbor spammers. Reputable ISPs all have a policy that strictly prohibits spamming. So spammers have to find a spam-friendly provider to stay in business. These spam havens are only interested in making money, and the community be damned. If the legitimate customers flock to the competition, the spam hosts will see that spam is bad business. If you stay with a provider that has a pro-spam reputation, you’re prolonging the problem. Unfortunately some large ISPs, e.g. Pacific Bell, are spam-friendly.
- Insist that your ISP block email from spam-friendly networks. Wait a minute, didn’t he just say that filtering was no good? Yes, but blocking is different. It’s possible to set up the server to refuse to accept email from any particular area of the Internet. If the spammer is in that blocked-out area, he doesn’t get a chance to transmit his spam to our server. Thus the network isn’t slowed down, and our server doesn’t waste time processing junk email. There are several public lists of spam-friendly networks, and using several of them in layers provides a good degree of protection. (This server currently uses nine different public blocking lists.)
- The most successful of these lists is SPEWS, which has a simple but very effective policy about listing networks: first, they list only the spammer’s own network address. If the ISP doesn’t do the right thing and kick the spammer off the network, SPEWS increases the listing to include adjacent network addresses. And the listed space just keeps getting bigger and bigger until the spammers are gone. What starts out as the spammer’s problem very quickly becomes the ISP’s problem, as the other customer start to scream that their legitimate email is getting blocked by recipients who use SPEWS. Customers pay to get connected, not DISconnected, and the ISP knows this. There is a long history of spammers losing their Internet access because of blocking lists.
- Report the spam you get. Reputable ISPs don’t host spammers, but they don’t always know there’s a spammer on their network unless they get complaints from the public. It’s hard to know whom to complain to, because the spammers forge the email in an effort to divert complaints. The From line is always bogus, the various other headers are almost all bogus as well, even the web site advertised in the email may be several jumps away from the spammer’s real web site. Fortunately, there is SpamCop, a service that analyzes your spam and can tell you where to send that complaint—it even composes a polite complaint letter for you, and mails it. I’ve reported half a dozen spams while I’ve been typing this email.
All these measures are effective: they increase the spammer’s cost of doing business and put many spammers out of business permanently.