If the industry does not do something about spam, the government will do it for us. Seldom does the government do something for hightech that is really in the industries benefit. Currently there is a move afoot to promote the eTrust method of email validation into some kind of federal law. This is probably a bad idea, but this is not the forum to really discuss it.
What we should be discussing here is Solid.net efforts to fight spam. We do a number of things that we absolutely won't discuss on a web page. To tell spammers how we block their messages would give them hints about how to get around our blocks. But we use some of the spam blacklists and also block some spammers known to be particularly abusive from even connecting to our mail servers. At one ISP we have a relatively powerful computer doing nothing except scanning email for end user selected phrases and sorting messages that have those phrases to another machine where the user can look at the offending messages out of his normal email stream. This ISP is having to spend a very inappropriate amount of their support budget blocking spam for their users.
We maintain three local spam blocking lists:
A recent newletter had two adjacent articles. The first mentioned that spam was costing US companies $10 billion a year in lost productivity. The second mentioned that the Direct Marketing Association said that spam generated $7 billion in sales last year. At first glance, it looks like no matter how profitable spam is to its originators, it creates a net loss for the economy as a whole. Click here to look at the originals for these quotes.
If you would like to discuss if it could be mutually beneficial for us to provide services to you or to assist you in your own antispam efforts, send an email message to newservice@solid.net with a note about what services you would like to discuss.
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last changed 01-May-03