A Bounty on Spammers (CIO Insight) [LWN.net]

A Bounty on Spammers (CIO Insight)

Posted Sep 27, 2002 20:32 UTC (Fri) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646)
In reply to: A Bounty on Spammers (CIO Insight) by rmdirms
Parent article: A Bounty on Spammers (CIO Insight)

I don't see why one has to tag the originator of spam in Email.

Spam is made to sell something. It doesn't matter who sends it, eventually the responsibility lies with the originator. To make a buck the originator must include contact information in the spam, phone numbers, email, or URLs. This contact information can be used to track the spammer down by law enforcement.

As for your other comments, as a CEO, I won't answer on them...

Cheers, Joachim

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No, better sender information is still needed

Posted Sep 28, 2002 20:09 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

>This contact information can be used to track the spammer down by
>law enforcement.

This misses the point of the article, that enforcement would be done by private individuals (with the help of civil courts), and the point of the comment, which is that this means private individuals would have to have more information about other people than perhaps they should have.

I don't see anything wrong with having an anonymous email option. As with the properly labelled advertising emails, I would route all my anonymous email to a bin where I would scan it quickly every day or two, while leaving my regular mailbox open for mails that deserve my full and immediate attention. Much as my telephone routes anonymous calls to voicemail.

(I have email routing like that set up today, but due to the lack of clear labelling, it uses a formula that sometimes routes important email to the bulk bin).