The federal government sets up a reward system for information leading to the arrest and conviction of spammers. If you get a spam message, you go to the website, you use a credit card or paypal to make a transaction for whatever is being sold. You turn your receipt along with the original spam message and the unopened package with the spammer/vendors information on it over to the feds, who then notify your credit card company of the transaction.
A law would be passed requiring card issuers to turn over the specific merchant's bank account information to the feds, charge the offending account for the amount of the transaction, issue a credit for the original sale amount to the cardhodler who reported the transaction and cancel the merchant's card account.
At that point, standard money laundering laws would allow the feds to track the flow of money until the perpetrators are caught. Once convicted, the original cardholder would be entitled to some type of reward (flat fee, percentage of assets confiscated from the spammer, or whatever.)
I don't really have time to figure out the details of how this approach would work, but certainly something along these lines could be developed, with little or no intrusion of the government into the actual workings of the Internet.
The general idea is that there are already enough laws that allow the government to follow the money trail from the consumer to the spammer (or the spammers' clients), and so it must be possible to trace the transaction flow and find the perps. All that is needed is the will.
Obviously, there are bugs to be worked out (for example, what happens if 50 million spam recipients take the same action in order to collect 50 million reward payments).
But if it is possible, as we have seen, to force or entice the card companies not to process transactions from Internet-tobacco sellers who don't collect and pay sales tax, certainly the card companies could be enlisted in this battle against spam as well.
Submitted herewith as a start to a grass roots brainstorming session about how this problem could be solved once and for all.
Forgot to mention that I believe spamming should be labeled a Class A felony and a threat to national infrastructure, with sever criminal penalties including long prison terms and asset forfeiture.
And what about those scammers that just take your money and run (temporary web sites, e-mail accounts)? You're out the money you paid for the item.
I've been using a white-list filter for awhile, so only people I know can email me. I don't especially care who I'm missing, but it's not like I'm running a business anyway.
From a reply here:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1306815/posts
I'll all for something that sends an electric charge back to the spammer, at ever increasing voltages.
But that's just me.
Relax everybody! Before you go running off with your pitchforks just setup SpamAssassin and PostGrey on Your Linux Mailserver with Postfix and you will rid yourself of 99.5% of spam. I used to get 600 spams a day. Now it's down to 3 or 4. SpamAsassin does realtime checks of blacklisted mail servers and spam heuristics and Postgrey makes bulk emailing tools ineffective. Unfortunately the best most people are doing is client side Bayesian filtering which sucks and their ISPs are incompetent.
Forget regulation, go to www.pobox.com get an account there have it forward your email to your REAL email account and never give your actual account out to ANYONE....
POBOX.COM will filter out the spam and only deliver stuff that gets past their filters... and if you change email provders you never have to change your publicly listed email address, you just change where you have POBOX.COM forward the mail to.
This is also handy for figuring out which internet services are handing out your contact information to spammers and "mailing lists"...
No. There is no legal definition of Spam.
There won't be one. Like "loitering", everyone knows what it is, but there is no legal definition of it.
The solution will eventually consist of a small fee to send email, with authentication of the sender for billing purposes. This will give the same certainty of the identity of the sender as current credit card transactions. Not 100 %, but good.
The solution will also require tight control on which servers are allowed to connect to the internet and send mail, plus authentication.
We are nowhere near there yet.
The only thing to do now, is to never buy from Spam.
(But one person's Spam is another's marketing mail)
Aren't you spamming this board?
2) Sign up with an ISP that provides at least three email addresses with your access account.
3) Use one email address for private correspondence (friends, family). Tell them they are not to give the address to anyone. Instruct your friends and family that if someone asks them for your email address, have them tell that someone that they'll let you know that they want your email address. You then decide whether you want to give your private email address to the person asking. You can also decide to give them your non-personal email instead (see below). P.S. You should also tell your friends and family to treat your phone number the same as your personal email address. (And you do have an unlisted phone number, don't you?)
4) If any of your friends or family forward an email to you and several other people, send them back an email with the following message:
When sending an e-mail to a group of people who don't necessarily know each other, it is better to put the list of addresses in the "Bcc:" (blind cc) field than using the "To:" field. I can read the email address of everyone you sent this email to, and so can everyone else who received the email. This is not good practice for maintaining privacy and preventing the spread of viruses, worms, and spam. It's the equivalent of giving your personal phone book to each person you call.
5) Use the second email address (non-personal) for ordering items over the internet, confirmations, mailing lists, etc. Always check the options on the order forms, and opt out of any promotional emails unless you really really want to receive them. Don't give out your non-personal address more often than seven to ten days since the last time. This way you'll know who corrupted your address if you start getting spam. Send them a nasty email and STOP doing business with them.
6) You should be able to go quite awhile without getting spam by this method (I'm over two years). If the non-personal email gets corrupted, delete it (it's only for ordering and mailing lists) and create a new one for future use. If your personal email gets corrupted, delete it, create a new one, and raise bloody hell with your friends, relatives, or ISP, depending on the source of the corruption.
7) Do not post your email addresses on the internet. (Duh)
8) You can expand the above strategy to a third or fourth email address, each address used for a different purpose, if you are so inclined.
If all individuals followed the above guidelines, the mailing lists of email addresses that spammers use would slowly but surely dry up.
Best of all, no government involvement necessary.
I have had zero spam now for at least a year.
Zero.
Whatever you do, don't sign up with major carriers that have addresses like myname@cox.net. Such addresses are way to easy to guess with bot software because cox.net has zillions of valid addresses. My e-mail address is something like myemail@myurl.com. And since myurl.com only has three valid e-mail accounts, it will never be attacked by spammers.
Also, when you send your e-mail address over the net to anyone, don't put it in a style that can be detected by software. Don't type it myemail@myisp.com. Instead type it myemail-at-myisp-dot-com. A human can easily figure out how to use that address, but software will not find it.
There is a product out there (can't think of the name now) that will only forward e-mail from known accounts. To prevent hacking, the first time it sees an e-mail from an unknown account, it sends an image with a password in it that can't be read by software. If that e-mail is replied to, with the correct password by the sender, it's proof that a human is sending the mail, and the e-mail gets through.
The long term fix is a brand new e-mail system set up from scratch. It would have features that would prevent spam, such as opt-in recieving of e-mail, with ironclad security of sending address info.
Most spam is either from offshore or from spambots.
A spambot is a PC that was infected with a virus with a mass mailing payload.
If you want to do something about spam, switch to an ISP that uses RBLS (blacklists) and content filters on their inbound email relays.
You Might Be An Anti-Spam Kook If...
http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html