Spam: Yes, you're partly to blame

[prathapml]

Response to a story about an industry panel's conclusion that e-mail users are partly to blame for how out-of-control the spam problem is. Many Internet users are "lazy," tech executives noted during a panel discussion led by industry pundit Esther Dyson, and need incentive and education to practice better e-mail hygiene. While David Berlind agrees that end users are the most empowered to stem the tide of spam, he disagrees with the notion that users ought to accept more of the burden through better execution of best practices. Sure, it's your own **** fault -- but here's the real reason why.

View: ZDnet blogs

[mark]

I like the idea of letting the sender's mail being held by the sender's server until you decide to download it. You don't want it, let it sit there. That was a good idea.

[prathapml]

Oh, was that idea present on that page?

I did not fully read it.....

Anyways, the idea of it being stored on the sender's server is fantastic! Might instantly stop spam - considering that a person sending out a 4 KB spam (unlikely, considering images are larger) message to 15 million e-mail IDs (yes, its normal in spammer-world to operate on such a scale) would require approximately.....

*calculates*

OMG.... would require 55.8 TeraBytes of storage.

And this, when he sends out *EVERYTIME* - which translates to morning and evening (or more frequent). That would mean either the spammer should delete the old mail before sending out new ones, or keeps buying storage. Both of which is good news for us. And in any case, the spammer would get shut out by the ISP, since more likely than not, its the ISP's server that is sending mail.

Wow, spammers get killed with that idea. Fantastic!

I love it... I love it...

[Incroyable HULK]

This is the best Idea I have heard in a long time concerning spam!

Anyhow, they would find a solution to this new method in time...

[Incroyable HULK]

4KB * 15 000 000 = 60 000 000KB

60 000 000KB / 1024 = 58593,75MB

58593 / 1024 = 57,22Go

Crap! that's just 57Go of storage. And most of the time, Email images are stored only once on a Web Server... not in each Email.

[prathapml]

Turns out I added 9 zeros instead of 6!

Anyways, 57 GB of storage every morning and evening sounds like not a bad "collateral damage" ain't it?

define:

collat'eral dam'age:

-  any damage incidental to an activity, suffered by the party that initiated the action

[Zxian]

Man... 57Gigs.... I'm allowed 30MB on my university e-mail account, and 1 GB on Gmail... that's pretty nuts...

Definately a good idea, but I think that it would be really impractical. Imagine that I need to legitimately send a 10MB e-mail to someone. If that e-mail is sitting on my server until the other person is ready to recieve the e-mail. When they are ready to recieve it, their server would have to send a message to my server that they want to download the file. The file would be transfered from one server to the other, and then sent to the other person.

You can see that this would greatly slow down the way things are done.

Maybe a better way of doing this would be to have an option to bounce any spam messages back to the spammers server with a tag listing their e-mail address/account. That way, any spam e-mails that are classified as spam would be bounced back, causing their ISP to cut off their service due to a full inbox. Just something that I threw out there right now... may not be the best explanation.

Cheers!