Alternative & Renewable Energy Blog

They could make a law like they did with the cold calling telephone sales people. If you have to ask 3 times to be removed from their sevice, they will have to pay you through a fine to the State, which reimburses you a portion. They could also make it illegal to sell or otherwise provide personal email or contact information without explicit express written authorization that identifies the specific end users of the information and limits the distribution and use to only those end users. Add an escalating fine that must be paid to the State with a portion to be reimbursed to the person whose information security was violated. I am thinking a $100 fine would stop spam pretty quickly, and escalate at a rate of like 5 times per separate violation.

Of course you realize McAfee and Norton would fight this tooth and nail, as would a huge number of industries like the telecommunications companies and such, that regularly sell such information.

Call me draconian but incarceration would put a pretty abrupt halt to it. I consider it to be a crime against nature and consequently humanity. Once again, sadly, legislation is required just to get people to do what makes sense.

Of course I'm just talking about the spam. The spammers that are also scammers, the death penalty. Why not? What's the point of keeping around or even locking up a bunch of worthless bastards who spend their whole day trying to scam others and in effect stealing bandwidth that we all have to pay to do it. Treat them like we would any other parasite.

GA and eradicate the parasites at any costs because that is what they are!

Well that is unrealistic. Plus most of the spam is run through various people just looking for a job from corporations set up to make a profit off the get rich quick scheme they sold these poor people and the corporations set up to get their scam products sold through these spam ads. The best way to hurt this entire stream and stop the corporations is seriously impair the profit stream. If the have to make it more profitable for people to spam, they will lose profit themselves on the sales. Plus many people will risk most criminal prosecutions to make a little easy money. But who is going to work for free or losing money. Maybe the fine should be $10,000 for first time and $50,000 for second, and progressive. Obviously if they do not pay the fine, then they spend time in jail. Also, if a portion of the fine goes back to the complaintant, then the spammer would feel much more worried that people would file claims against them.

Yeah, I know. But I can dream. Of course in a perfect world, without greed...

The first thing I do every day is turn on my computer, go to E-mail and delete all the spam messages. I get at least one and sometimes as much as 8 spams a day. If I added up all the money I would get from all those spams, I would be the richest man in the world.

I wish they would rename "spam" as it is the name of a food product that I much enjoy.

You are very lucky. You only get 8 per day. Sometimes I get 8 per hour.

The answer is simple (but maybe a tough political and technological effort). Tax each email processed by every ISP or other mass internet portal an amount equal to the cost of the carbon footprint. Outgoing emails would be charged to subscribers. Incoming emails would be charged to subscribers only if they downloaded them.

Ed Weldon

Careful Ed. making people pay for each email would pretty quickly put a crimp in forums like this one. It might even kill it off.

That is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard!

Opman -- This isn't as crazy as it sounds. We're talking small fractions of a penny per email. I'm not the first one to suggest this.

Chances are your ISP would give you several hundred free ones each month because that's cheaper for them than the extra billing effort would cost. Even if you were running a business and working an email list of real customers this would still be a trivial advertising cost.

Ed Weldon

Trivial to you maybe; but not to everyone.

I am self employed and rely heavily on email to stay in touch. I have not had one single new job in the past three months and had two cancellations. The only prospect at the moment is generating over one hundred email per month as I reply to his questions. I finally had to insist he pay me something as a consulting fee.

Participating in CR4 is about the only entertainment diversion I have from networking trying to generate some work. We cannot get TV where I live. If I had to start paying per email in addition to the monthly fee, well you know what gets cut first. I know of a number of acquaintances in the same boat.

Since most spam sources are outside US juristictions its hopeless to catch and punish them. A friend who worked in computer securiy tracking such things told me its hopeless to try and prosecute them. Even if the spam relates to a domestic product, haven't you noticed the payment process is often to an offshore account.

I am not sure that taxation is the solution since it would drive all the market to an equal cost point. Think of mailers, they are essentially taxed by the mail delivery cost in order to distribute their advertisement, and yet you still get a ton of trivial mail that wastes money. The cost point to stop the trivial mail is so high, becasue to the profit they make off of these scame, that it would make real usage unaffordable. They really just need to do it like they did the telemarketing and fine the hell out of them if the recipient requests to be removed from their services and still receives emails. I know that really reduced the level of telemarketing that occurred in the 1990s. Plus email is easier to document a request to no longer receive any correspondence from a particular service, thus easier to prosecute. fine them some amount and give a portion back to the complaintant and they spam will rapidly decline, because in essence you are paying the people with the spammers money (and their clients money). If you make it cost enough to spam mail people who do not want the service, they will stop extremely rapidly. After all advertising is just overhead, and if the overhead get to expensive relative to the sales gained from that overhead, the business quits or goes broke.

Be careful with getting the legal eagles involved in this. One thing that must be born in mind is that one man's spam is another man's vital information. It makes me very, VERY nervous thinking about a government deciding what I can and cannot receive in my e-mail box. Maybe better to put a limit on how many addressees a particular broadcasted message can be sent to? I'm not sure how to do that, but if one can only send, say, 100 copies of a message before it self-destructs and the author must recompose, then I am sure the economics of the spam industry would be seriously challenged...

Very good point. Makes me wonder who are those spam loving people but I guess that's the nature of a diverse society.

Scamming though is a no-brainer. Burn those scum bags.

it may be helpful to ask 'what is the source of this information, and what do they get out of it'. methinks mcaffee simple is stirring up trouble in order to sell more anti spam 'suites' of software.

GA nd I do believe the over restriction is not the answer either.

This can be viewed as a new form of money extortion and there's no control can be exercised over it.

So, we have to put up with spams and be vigilant not to become a victim of them!

SPAM has to be against the law.

In France it is against the law. Someone received SPAM from Microsoft and sued because it met minimum contact requirements.

Microsoft had to respond to France's legal issue and lost. Microsoft then appealed the ruling in the United States and the ruling was overturned because Microsoft didn't break any laws in the United States.

Wjhile we do not have jurisdiction in those countries, we have jurisdiction over the mail, electronic or snail, and can prosecute for any number of federal violations. For countries that do not take appropriate measures, it is actually easy to block all incoming mail from that countries addresses. Nigeria would take a very different stance if all the email from originating from their country addresses were blocked by Europe and the US. (Of course the dirty secret is that many times these nigerians are working on the behalf of US companies to operate some of these scams). Plus we restrict telephone sales call, why not email sales/promotions in a similar manner.