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David is an occasional blogger, software engineer, Nintendo fanboy, liberal, news magazine addict, voracious TiVo user, and bibliophile. He was born in St. Louis, grew up in southern Indiana, and returned to St. Louis to attend Washington University. He hasn't managed to escape yet. He's a fan of free wine tastings, too many tv shows to name, and eating out. David makes his living developing web applications used internally by his employer. He doesn't blog about work because he's heard too many stories about that causing workplace troubles. There's more on the about page. |
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30 November 2002 - 10:04 pm
I started using spamassassin on my CEC email account on 3 September 2002. In the 88 days that I've been using it to filter the spam out of my inbox, I've received 1757 spam messages and one false positive. This comes out to slightly less than 20 spams per day. All told, spam makes up almost 1/5 of my 100MB CEC disk quota. And I only get an average of 15 non-spam messages in my inbox each day. (And my definition of non-spam is rather liberal, as I include everything that gets into my inbox in this definition. And a spam or two usually sneaks in every day.)
I've read a number of proposals on how to deal with spam. One of the most interesting (I wish I could find the link for you), recommended a one cent fee be charged for each email sent. Since this comes to less than a dollar a day for most normal users of email, this wouldn't be too bad (especially since a tweak to the system recommends that each email recipient be credited with 3/4 of a cent for future emails), but it would stop mass mailers in their tracks, as none of them could afford the thousands of dollars it would cost them to send their millions of spam messages. Of course, the main drawback is that groups that legitimately send bulk messages would face some hefty fees. Perhaps ISP could get in for a one-time fee if they promise to police diligently for spam? For example, I'm not opposed to having a cap on the number of emails I can send each day. Two hundred seems very reasonable. It's way more than I would ever send, but far fewer than a spammer could use. And groups that have a legitimate use for bulk mailing could show the ISP proof that people opted in to the mailing list in order to get a bigger cap.
If anyone has other ideas, let me know. It just seems like we need to start filtering spam at the source rather than at the destination.
Posted by on 30 November 2002 at 10:04 PM
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