Microsoft pushes spam-filtering technology

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This can help...NOT!

...bar spammers from sending junk e-mail.

For each a million e-mails, it would cost spammer about $10,000.

Other providers might start to charge customers/spammers per e-mail. This will be added to the monthly bill, however, free e-mail services will go out of business if I'm right since spammers could use free e-mail accounts to spam. Paying about a cent or 2 per e-mail is the way to go.

This charging for e-mail bit would only work if spam were sent through legitimate ports. There are, however, several obstacles in the way.

1.) You do NOT need to go through your ISP's e-mail server to send e-mail.

a.) You can visit www.tucows.com or www.downloads.com and download any number of e-mail server apps. Some are better than others. Some are free, some are not. Some run under Windows, some Linux. But they ALL have one thing in common - they ALL bypass your ISP's servers entirely.

And even IF most of those e-mail programs were reengineered to charge you per e-mail, how long do you think it would take before a crack was written and made available that got around that? - 5 minutes perhaps?

b.) How many dozens of e-mail viruses are out there in the "wild" that are self-mailing - i.e. they have their own built in SMTP services.

Answer: TOO MANY!

c.) How many of those above mentioned viruses have been designed to deliver a payload that turns your garden variety unprotected PC into a ZOMBIE that can be used to send spam?

Answer: WAY TOO MANY! With PLENTY more on the horizon!

There are just too many ways to shoot holes in this plan to stop spam. It might have worked, had it been implemented 10 - 15 years ago when the 'net was new and things like this could have been clamped down before they got out of hand. But at this point, all you wind up doing is penalizing the legit users and those victimized by their own idiocy (they did, after all, open that unsafe attachment and got infected AND didn't have a good AV program running!).

Charging is NOT the way to go.

Posted by: Wolfie2K3   Posted on: 06/25/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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