FTC slaps orders on alleged diet pill spamvertising scam scum Watchdogs at the US FTC (Federal Trade Commission) have obtained a restraining order against alleged diet pill scammers. The “Com Spammers”, nick-named over their use of domain names in the form of com-XXX.net, where XXX are three or four random characters, have been pushing out huge volumes of email and SMS spam for years. …
Tiny wrinkles of improvement in email? Take the new Gmail Inbox, for example. (Please!)
Lipstick on a pig. Ugly chartreuse lipstick on a ugly wrinkled pig.
The main problem with email remains unchanged: It's the SPAM, stupid.
Why don't any of the major email systems provide us with effective anti-spammer tools? Hey, you don't have to help, but I REALLY want to destroy the spammers' business models. Cut them away from the money and the spam problem will be reduced. No, the spammers will not be magically transformed into actual human beings, but they will crawl under less visible rocks.
Today's case in point: Are you smart enough to recognize a diet-pill scam? Then you could help shut it down. Imagine an iterative webform where you would identify the exact countermeasures to hurt the spammers as badly as possible. Arbitrary example (of MANY), but imagine the spammer is using a link shortener. The best countermeasure is NOT to nuke it. The best countermeasure is to repoint it to the spammer's worst nightmare, but that needs some human help. When I recognize the diet-pill scam, then I can suggest the relinking of the spammer's shortened link to point at a website warning about fake diet pills. Voila, the scammer's own spam becomes advertising AGAINST himself.
We could do MUCH better, but the google and Microsoft are too evil to bother, and Yahoo is too near death. Sad that the spam problem will probably outlive all of them. We could do better, and most people are nice enough to want to.
"Why don't any of the major email systems provide us with effective anti-spammer tools? "
They do. 99.9% of spam gets rejected long before delivery.
Imagine how bad it'd be if the filters weren't there (I don't have to imagine).
Now imagine how loudly people would scream if you managed to raise that to 99.99%, but the cost is that that important business contract got rejected or gmail called your granny a spammer.
THAT is what's hard about spamfighting.
Now, wonder why outfits(*) spend so much effort tagging inbound spam but do sod-all about stopping it going out, or (worse) tag it as spam on the way out and deliver it to the destination anyway. It's generally a better idea to cleanup a polluted river by stopping the shit getting into it in the first place than trying to run better filtration systems.
(*) Most, but not all, Some do very good jobs of preventing shit getting out but the usual suspects(**) don't make any effort at all.
(**) ISPs run by Telcos and content providers. The ones with state-sanctioned monopolies (USA and China f'instance) are the worst offenders because there's no incentive for them to cleanup.
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