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[[WhatWeCanDo]] to create a better world includes boycotting spam.

As a [[CitizensOfTheWorld]] your refusal to buy, look at, or click on any spam emails or popups can eliminate this nusence.  Laws may be needed...(shoot anybody that says that, there are too many laws), but [[WE]] are spammed because spam works.  If [[WE]] don't want spam, then out duty is to make spam unprofitable.

There is a lot more that [[WE]] can and will do to defeat spam.  And some of us will take those steps.  But it is ever bodies job to never reward spam by buying it.

# Report spam to [[|http://spamcop.net spam cop]], be fair and make sure it is really span and not something you signed up for.  You can always report spam that does not have remove from list instructions.
# [[BoyCottViagra]]====  Get Viagra to run an anti spam campaign.  This is genius, hurts their competition more than them while improving their image, reaching the public, a great alternative to a boycott of the Viagra brand, this could go a long way toward anti-spam education.  WE could have the power to enforce this ultimatum.
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Err.... viagra? A good idea, but wrong crowd... (Viagra is targeted toward seniors ;-P)

Perhaps an [[AntiSpamLetter]] written to different organizations, including government and corporate asking them to help us, companies that target the crowd spam is aimed at (middle-aged adults who use the computer often).

[[SpamCOp]] is an option, but seems dragged out to me. There is another way then ignoring it. --KenSchry
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Won't do any good.

According to several different sources (including Jupiter Media), 95% of all spam comes from illegal scammers. They are practicing fraudulent means to get people to send them money. This list of 95% generators is made up of slightly less then 100 people.

Why won't these things do any good then? Because they are already criminals. They simply close shop with one ISP, and move onto the next. They use credit card and identity details people SENT them, so they never use their own home identities. They are generally crossing national border, electronically. Most of their emailing, they simply use open relay mail servers (which is the default configuration for over 80% of all mail server packages currently being sold/supported).

So, the smallest 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of all computer-networked people are doing this. That's less then the number of serial murderers currently in the human society. We cannot catch the serial murderers that are good at what they do... and we will not catch the big dogs of scamming spam.

What's that leave? The idiots, and the genuine marketing (ie Sears spamming you about all their various sales and products, because you used their Sears Car service to repair something on your car, and used their web site to schedule a convinent time to take your car in for servicing, for instance).

Scammers will be around so long as people are greedy and trusting. Spam will exist so long as the economics of sending email puts the majority of the cost on the infrastructure and the reciever. If all real world mail was COD that was automatically paid, a truck would pull up to your house every day, and drop off junk mail to you. This doesn't happen. Why? Because the cost of mailing a real world packet is paid for by the mailer. With email, the emailer only pays for a fraction of what's involved (his time, his machine(s), bandwidth to email servers, and maybe a flat monthly service fee). Extreme low cost for a single individual to a serious reward (with a very low chance for unwanted repercussions) = criminal paradise.

You can cut down on your spam, by using various kill file technologies, never responding to anything you are not interested in, and changing email addresses ever few years. But as long as the economics so strong favor spamming, it is here to stay. To get rid of spam efficently and effectively requires that every email you send, you PAY $0.50 or $1.00 for. At $0.50, the price to the spammer to send out 1 million emails is $500,000. 10 million? $5,000,000. By raising the cost of doing business, we exclude the cheap, proficent, criminal spammer. And that's 95% of all spam in the known digiverse. No more "Grow your penis 6 cm with our product", no more "Put all the (opposite sex) into heat when you wear our genetically engineered musk====", no more "See 10 inch pre-op she-males taking it intimately from our donkey mascot!". There will still be spam. Just not the current huge barrage of one greedy rude idiot doing it, and trying to prey on others using massive numbers of outgoing emails though.
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---StarPilot

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I almost dropped my ISP because of hundreds of spam-mail daily. They got a pretty good filter now.
Now I only get about 10 spam's. But the number is g'''r'''o'''w'''i'''n'''g again. The stuff that is not blacklisted by the third party blacklister like spam cop don't get filtered. I don't want to report 10 spams a day. I want a button on my web mail that tells the server to delete this, and add the offending selected text of the message to the filter. And I don't care if it is from Sears, I just want to notify the  mail server, so I wont ever have to see it again, again, and again.
P.S. The stuff I get from root @at xanthus do.t  is filtered. I cant unfilter possable offending non junk with out making a phone call and contacting the admins and, and, and.

---KaJoTra
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Ah.. but what is one man's spam, is another man's item of interest.

Shared spam/ham lists eventually fail. Why? Because they grow too large. When you have a large enough group determining if something is ham (good email) versus spam (bad email), eventually the majority will decide that everything is spam.

For your personal filtering needs, I'd suggest a Bayen filter. You show it what you find acceptable (and/or unacceptable), and it filters all incoming mail based on how close that mail comes to what you've taught it is good or bad. It places the stuff appropriately.

For instance, at work, I run the freeware plugin, Outlook [[SpamBayen]]. I get 20 emails a day from a Security Mailing List I am a member of. I am interested in the new significant security bulletins (new virus, new trojan, new worm, new vulnerabilities publicized/patched), but not the insignificant ones ("Panda has released a virus update defination"). If you are tired of spam and use Outlook, you might want to try it out. As it's free, it will only cost you your own time. If you don't use Outlook, then you'll have to keep looking. But there are other Bayen solutions out there for most platforms, from what I've read about.

---StarPilot

*The solution to spam is not to simply ignore it.

Sorry, Ken, but the PERSONAL solution to spam is to ignore it.

Now, eventually, what will happen is that people will stop using email. Why? Because spam rates continue to rise. It's already more then 50% of all email, and it continues to grow. So long as one person can SEND email, their will be spam. Whether its someone trying to scam your credit card info, get you to subscribe to a craft magazine, sell you a slightly used F-14, or your cousin forwarding a really bad joke.

As the volume of spam overwhelms ISPs, they will eventually stop supporting email. ISPs used to complain about hosting USENET, because of all the volume (of porn pictures) traversing it every day required so much storage space. Many ISPs now ignore USENET completely, and if their subscribers want USENET, they have to go find an outlet that provides it. Watch... ISPs will do the same with email, as it traverses from economic to uneconomic to store all the incoming and outgoing messages.

However, when that happens, spam will just move on to whatever cheap sending medium gets used by people until it ruins that.

Until the economics are arranged so the majority of the cost to send communications rests on the sender, ''''spam'''' will be a growing plague, the kudzu that chokes the life out of cheap digital communication mediums. Are you willing to pay a handling fee/tax on every email you send? If you are, you are ready to do away with spam. The economics have to be set up to make it too costly to mass mail people. Otherwise, spam will continue to grown, and evolve into the new communication techniques/technologies.

Don't take my word for it. Do some research. Right now, the most cost effective means of getting money, whether its scamming credit cards or selling hand-made cuckoo clocks, is email mass-marketing (spam). It's purely a matter of economics. You have to change the economics to render a change in behavior. (sounds like [[SkinnersLaw]] to me...)

---StarPilot
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More and more spam is now email fraud.  Emails appearently from your bank or internet provider asking to verify your vredit information, or deals too good to be true that seem to be from reputable companies.  It is a bad idea to click on anything you get in an unsolisited email since you can easily catch an email worm or have your credit card info stolen if you buy something.

It something looks good in a spam, go to google and find it independently, never click on a spam.

--JimScarver

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See [[StopSpamNow]]