"Andrew Gideon" wrote in message
online.com...
Remember that spammers exist because someone is buying. That tells us the
best way to kill them off: get people to stop buying from spammers.

Unfortunately, since there's practically no scaling cost associated with
sending bulk email, you'd have to eliminate EVERY single spam response to
get rid of it. When their response rate goes down, they just send more
email.

The social solution is a key element, to be sure. But there's always some
sucker out there willing to respond to spam. Stiff laws against the kind of
tactics spammers use are needed, they need to be enforced, and they need to
be passed everywhere, or at least enough places that ISPs can block email
from places known to harbor spammers while still allowing 99% of the users
to receive all of their email from all of their associates.

It's not advertising per se that's the problem. It's the fact that the bulk
of the advertising is being sent by people who don't care whether you are
likely to reply or not, who know that they would get in trouble if they were
found out, and who take steps to cover their tracks. Their anonymity
prevents them from acting responsibly in the (currently) wide-open Internet.

Of course, one day, we'll have an Internet where there's no such thing as
unauthenticated transmissions, and at that point, it will be much easier to
tackle problems like this. Until that day, I agree with you that people
need to stop replying to spam, while I disagree that doing so is the "best
way" to fight spam. Even more, we need to be aggressive about not
permitting the general behavior of spammers in the first place.

Pete