Lovely Spam!

If you’ve ever tasted the ubiquitous junk food in a can marketed as Spam you will know why the name is such an appropriate description of junk email.

No doubt the Monty Python team had no idea that their satirical take on Spam would outlast the rest of their comedy routines and live on thanks to the Internet.

According to endless surveys by armies of analysts there’s now more spam out there than real email.

And nobody seems to know how to stop it, despite the best efforts of another army of anti-spam vendors.

Microsoft’s Bill Gates came up with a suggestion but that was soon ridiculed by all and sundry as too hard, too expensive or just plain unlikely to work anyway.

Right now we rely on blacklists of known spammers which no doubt have every spammer as a subscriber so they’ll know when they’ve been tumbled, and various filtering technologies that try to look into your emails to spot the spam.

What everyone knows but nobody is prepared to say, is that spam could be stopped tomorrow by the simple act of making ISPs responsible for the quality of the emails they forward to your inbox.

What incentive is there now for them to restrict the flow of bytes, which is how they earn their living? Absolutely none.

However, if ISPs were liable to recompense their customers for every spam delivered, you can bet they’d come up with instantaneous solutions to stem the flow of rebates.

Yeah, of course, there will be a barrage of reasons why this couldn’t work, but the simple truth is that ISPs benefit financially from spam, since they charge you to receive the stuff, and if it cost them money instead of you, they would work a damn sight harder to make it stop.

As users of the Internet we don’t need to know how to stop spam we just need to vote with our keyboards and migrate to the first ISP that guarantees to stem the tide and offer a rebate for any spam that gets through their system and into your inbox.

In the US there’s little or no snail mail spam because the postman is under instructions not to deliver the stuff, as well as it being an offence to send it in the first place.

All that has happened so far in the war against spam is that governments have legislated to make it an offence to send spam, yet there is no penalty for delivering the stuff. We need to change that and start shooting the messengers.

In a war of attrition the side that can take the most casualties always wins, so we need to start sacrificing some ISPs to the Internet gods.