The Best Way To Stop Spam: Kill The Margins
Found on Techdirt on Tuesday, 02 December 2008
Despite the advances in anti-spam technology and spammers getting sued, shutting down and having their service providers cut off their operations, the torrent of spam hitting email inboxes continues unabated.
A BBC story cites some earlier research that says spammers sending out 350 million messages a month can earn roughly $100 per day, while the entire massive Storm botnet could generate around $2 million per year.
But the underlying issue remains the fact that people click on spam and buy stuff through it. Changing that might be even harder than developing the perfect spam filter.
It will continue to be a cat and mouse game between spammers and spam-fighters. There are options, like using a separate address for each person and company you're in contact with. That way, once you're getting spam on the card012634@yourdomain.com address which you used to sign up at dubiousgiftcards.com, simply remove that address from your email system. Now that address is worthless to spammers. As a nice side effect, you'll see who leaks (or even sells) your email information, since they are unique and map to a single of your contacts only.