British anti-spam legislation 1

[GwydionM]

Interesting things are happening over here.
"From the end of this year, it will be an offence for a British firm to send unsolicited junk mail to personal email accounts - but business addresses will remain unprotected" - see

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/ecommerce/0,39020372,39116473,00.htm

and

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/030919/152/e8w6s.html

for details.

There is valid concern that businesses are not protected. But when was your small business last offered a penis enlargement?

Companies get harassed by people offering them things that they might occasionally want. Also someone gets paid for sifting them and passing them on to a manager who might be able to say yes or no.

If advertisers have to check who they are writing to, filter out the business from the personal, that will stop the worst abuse.

 

[sleipnir214]

GwydionM:
<aside>
<sarcasm>
I'm going to have to assign a penalty for excessive use of emoticons in a post.
</sarcasm>
</aside>


I'd say that the very nature of business is to be open to possible business opportunities from other businesses.

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TANSTAAFL!!

 

[unixtechie]

Someone explain to me why the great push for spam legislation?

Yes, spam is indeed annoying, however, I fail to see how it is different than the junk mail I receive that is delivered by the postal system. And telemarketing is just now getting the &quot;do not call&quot; list published, however, that is going to be full of legal loopholes that were negotiated by politicians and found by corporate lawyers.

Spam can be filtered out more easily than postal mail, because though I can ask my mail carrier to toss it in the trash, he is obligated by law to deliver it.

 

[manarth]

unixtechie: &quot;Yes, spam is indeed annoying, however, I fail to see how it is different than the junk mail I receive that is delivered by the postal system&quot;
When 50% of the internet's email is spam, we have what many would consider to be a serious problem. the problem is that spam doesn't scale; the cost of postal junk mail is bourne by the sender - this doesn't apply to email.
see also: thread717-615801, thread717-580962, thread717-573842, thread717-551021, and thread717-514043
The IT Ethics Forum seems to generate quite a few spam-related posts!


Gwydion M &quot;But when was your small business last offered a penis enlargement?&quot;

Well, to be honest - last week....but that was when we turned 'Spam Assassin' on; before that we received dozens each day. They're now safely delivered to a spam folder, which, unfortunately, we still have to look through to ensure legitimate emails haven't been dropped.

Still, I can't help but applaud the legislation - now if only we can get the rest of the world to follow suit...

<marc> i wonder what will happen if i press this...[ul][li]please give feedback on what works / what doesn't[/li][li]need some help? how to get a better answer: faq581-3339[/li][/ul]

 

[GwydionM]

Unixtechie says, &quot;I fail to see how it is different than the junk mail I receive that is delivered by the postal system.&quot;

I get four or five items of junk mail a week, 10 or 12 items of junk e-mail per day.

Most of it shows 'targetting', I've not had any offers that only an idiot would accept.

I have occasionally got something I wanted among the junk mail.

Senders of junk mail pay for postage, and thus help support the postal system. Junk e-mailers are parasites on a system that other people make good use of. And which all of us pay for, indirectly,

 

[Grenage]

I'm all for it, seems futile though.

What they really need is a completely fresh mail authentification so that email addresses cannot be spoofed!

 

[GwydionM]

Let a spammer e-mail 50,000 Britons, and the British government will be after them for 250 million in fines! And I don't believe that the normal conceilment techniques would fool a government agency that is seriously out to get someone.

 

[Grenage]

Yes but you shouldn't be able to spoof addresses anyway!

Also, with this only affecting British spammers it won't make any real difference.

 

[Stevehewitt]

Unfortuantly you are correct. At a guess I would say that UK spammers make up about 30% of my spam, so the other 70% from the US won't be affected.
Unless of course the US actually do something about it other than the most stupid system in the world - Opt out!!! It just gets worse...

Steve.

 

[cian]

All spam drives me nuts, emails I can delete, snail-mail spam I get on a daily basis but I can put a notice on my door not to deliver it, they actually listen here. Except that the missus likes to read them...bugger LOL

Good on the Uk for taking a step, it's a tiny one but a step in the right direction none-the-less.




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[unixtechie]

So use procmail and filter your spam.

My postman won't filter my postal mail, but with email you can.

 

[sleipnir214]

There are a couple of major flaws with your idea.

The first is that junk-snail-mail senders aren't trying to make their junk look like a letter from your Aunt Marge. Even something like procmail doesn't catch everything and has the problem of falsely identifying a message as spam.

Even if you have stopped the message at your mail server, your server, your network, your ISP, and various networks on the internet have to process this stuff. It eats up bandwidth and processor ticks.

Sweeping your dirt under the rug is not cleaning your living room.

Want the best answers? Ask the best questions:

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TANSTAAFL!!

 

[Stevehewitt]

I couldn't agree more with Sleipnir214 (Hey! That has got to be a first! ;-)) Spot on.

unixtechie
Why should I have to purchase software, configure it, maintain it and then run the risk of deleting my real mail by mistake so that people can send me emails that I haven't asked for?

There is no good reason, therfore I am in full support of the British Government for doing this. Hopefully the EU next, and you never know - possibly the US!

Thanks,

Steve.

 

[unixtechie]

You don't have to buy procmail.

Not a fan of spam myself, but you can control it if you have the need or desire to do so.

 

[manarth]

unixtechie: the point is - you can control at when it's reached it's destination.

It's already eaten up huge chunks of bandwidth and increases the overall cost of maintaining the net. We all pay for this through our taxes (where the government subsides some of the cost of the net) and through our bill from our ISP.

As has been mentioned, controlling spam relies on maintaining some sort of anti-spam program, and runs the risk of binning important emails. something a business can't necessarily risk.

If you have a read of the threads mentioned above, there's some good explanations of why spam is such a scourge and should be stopped.

snail-mail is self-limiting: the junk-mailer pays for it.
if spam were to remain uncontrolled, it would undoubtably continue it's increase - what would happen to the internet if 99% of emails were spam? or 99.99%?

sending 10million spam mail costs little more than sending 1 email: i.e. practically nothing. if everyone adopted this attitude, it would destroy email as a practical communication mechanism.



<marc> i wonder what will happen if i press this...[ul][li]please give feedback on what works / what doesn't[/li][li]need some help? how to get a better answer: faq581-3339[/li][/ul]

 

[clarkin]

Not to mention that the 'receiver pays' cost of receiving email will jump way, way up when you use something like a mobile device to read your email.

At the moment most folks ignore spam as an annoyance as the cost to them is pretty much nothing (internet use from home is pretty cheap these days).

Once you move to accessing the web / your email from a mobile device where you get to pay per KB - then 80% of your email being spam will REALLY get annoying as you have to pay through the nose to get it!

Posting code? Wrap it with code tags: [ignore]

[/ignore][code]CodeHere

[ignore][/code][/ignore].

 

[cian]

clarkin
I check my mails daily from a mobile phone, twice daily at weekends, when I get 80% spam it DOES p1ss me off!

It's about time companies started using some sort of digital signature for all business emails. It would make it very easy to block anything that wasn't business related.

Something similar can be done for personal emails.
The technology is probably in place we just don't use it.




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[clarkin]

cian: what's that translate to in direct costs for you?

Eg: you on average get 20 emails a day (15 of which are horrendous spam).
The average spam email has size = 20KB (random guess, but they are usually full of HTML mush to confuse and bewilder you).
The avg business email has size = 2KB.
Your mobile telco charges you 2c / KB for GPRS to read your email (just grabbed that from vodafone.ie as an example)

So your business emails just cost you 5 * 2KB * 0.02/KB = EUR 0.10
The spam that was delivered with them just cost you 15 * 20KB * 0.02/KB = EUR 6.00

Wuh oh! :-(

if spam email size is 10x that of business emails, and 75% of your emails are spam it will cost you 60 times more for the spam...


Posting code? Wrap it with code tags: [ignore]

[/ignore][code]CodeHere

[ignore][/code][/ignore].

 

[jwenting]

At the moment I filter about a thousand spam messages a WEEK. At an average size of 20KB, that's almost 20MB of spam a week that goes over the network and is offered to my mailserver.
As the address is an old one and I'm active in usenet and online forums that amount is likely more than average, but even if the average person only receives 250 a week that still means my ISP with rougly 200.000 subscribers receives 50.000.000 messages times 20KB on average is 1.000.000.000 KB or rougly a gigabyte of spam a week most of which is passed through to the subscribers as most don't run SMTP mail delivery which allows them to block it serverlevel.

Add the virus emails (which I didn't include) which currently run at 100MB on my account alone per DAY and you're talking serious data.
Even if the average person gets only 1% as much, that's 200GB of data a DAY that my ISP is currently processing in virus emails sent to their subscribers.

 

[cian]

clarkin
to be honest I never checked the costs closely, only the mail headers are downloaded so the spam only costs me the time it takes to delete the mails, still it's enough!
And the company 'generally' pays the bill




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