Comments on: Tech execs: Wake up and smell the spam

Products alone won't win against increasingly nasty junk e-mail; Net users must raise awareness, say tech bigwigs.
Photo: Execs talk spam

[ttul]

Spam is not going away -- ever

So long as the public Internet remains public, spammers and criminals will find a way to force messages upon us in a way that is economically advantageous to their cause. The reason: so long as email remains cheap enough as to be useful to the "honest" population, it will be cheap enough to be exploited by spammers.

The only way to end spam is to make email so expensive to send that it becomes useless as a general public communication mechanism. How do we make it expensive? Well, for a start we could require everyone to run a fancy spam filter. Or require everyone to participate in an accreditation service (accreditation means paying money to someone like Verisign in exchange for their blessing). Or put in mechanisms that make email no longer public (
http://www.mailchannels.com).

Regardless of the mechanism chosen to end spam, spam will always continue as a problem. It's a social problem and the only way to permanently solve it is to kill all the spammers. In other words, to create a police state in which email is no longer relevant.

[Ubber geek]

end spam

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[Prndll]

"...Laziness has dire consequences."

This is exactly what I'm saying.....
A user cannot put on someone else to do those things that they must do for themselves. The idea that an ISP would be given the responsability of filtering email (in any way) is crazy. If your going to own a pc and your going to be online, then you must understand that you need to take the time to learn about what it all really is. It is simply the idea that too many people don't want to learn anything about computers or the internet that they fall victom to the pitfalls found online. Self education is such a must for just being connected. If a user is unwilling are unable to learn...that user has no business online. It is the end user's responsability to learn to do things for themselves. Otherwise, the result is generally spam, ID theft, viri infection, or worse....being controlled by some corporate entity.