Information Week columnist Bob Evans held a little contest in his "Business Technology" column. Give me a creative solution to the spam problem, he said, and we'll send you to a conference in Amelia Island, Florida (which is lovely, by the way). The answers were entertaining, innovative and informative.
His winner gave a detailed description of the tools that have been tried so far; and suggested a practical solution: greylisting. Some of the other ideas, though not award-winning, were certainly amusing. A couple of bright ideas:
-
"Put them in a secured software camp where they work eight hours a day at spam-detection and intervention. Time off for creativity and keeping one jump ahead of their former cronies." - Lynn Hogarth
-
Spammers should have to do time consisting of "deleting one spam message per second over a 10-hour day. A typical sentence would be three years—I am sure after deleting that many E-mails, the spammer would be cured of any desire to spam or even look at a computer screen for quite a long time." - Jeffrey A. Romeo
-
And the best of all: "Do not (under any circumstances) buy their products! They will stop if their costs are higher than their revenue!" - Carl Edmunds
1. Manual trackback to http://richi.co.uk/blog/2004/12/is-this-best-we-can-do-to-fight-spam.html - please go to my blog for the full post.
Can't say I'm too impressed with the answers Bob got. (Reading between the lines, I don't think he is, either.)
Tempfailing is a nice idea in theory, but it doesn't work any more. These days, most spam is sent by botnets. The spamming software is quite capable of queueing and retrying, just like any regular MTA is.
I can't help thinking that greylisting advocates have an exaggerated sense of spammers' technical stupidity.
Posted at 4:51AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Richi Jennings