The secondary problem is that SMTP (Simpl Mail Transport Protocol) is unsecure. I can send an email with any return address and any sending address I want, and there is no way for anyone to know the email isn’t really from the person it says it is from.

If I knew Christy’s and TRex’s email addresses, I could send Christy an email, purporting to be from TRex, with explicit photos of hot sex, and there would be no way she could tell it wasn’t from TRex until she opened it and saw the contents. Oh wait. Maybe I should have used a different example.

Anyway, unless a new email protocol is created and enforced (part of what Gates wanted to do), anti-spam efforts will get no better than they already are. Attempts to legislate and prosecute are a waste of valuable resources, which would be better employed going after violent criminals.

Spam. Get used to it.

R.

What has become much more irrational in my opinion is the expense of online trading — the cost is bizarre, almost free. ??? Suggests to me that the pricing structure is regressive; those folks with the most money pay the least in fees as a percentage of assets banked/invested.

rumi (168) — I suspect the costs related to dealing with claims and anti-phishing, not to mention having to develop their own additional layers of security and anti-spam/anti-malware protection probably exceed any profits that the financial industry makes from the processing of illegal transactions. The bigger question is whether there are financial businesses that are set up solely for this purpose that are not being dealt with by government agencies; remember that BCCI was not a bank in the traditional sense of the word, but it was a bank. Are there BCCI-like institutions that the rest of the banking industry is ignoring? Possibly — but the costs to the rest of the financial industry are so high that there’s an incentive to shut them down. It would be nice to see more investigation into this realm, though.

Just a last thought to clarify something. When I mentioned the banking industry profits, I’m referring to their practice of raising all fees in the justification of offsetting loss. For instance, the simple NSF fee is now many times higher than it ever was when any fee was justified by the labor involved. The technology reduced the cost of processing but the fees kept going up. Also, any smart financial/banking industry will invest in anti-IDtheft companies so they’ll profit anyway.

Thanks Siun – no worries here. I figured it was a filter, not a human, if my comments were blocked. It’s fine if they don’t make it through.

a lot of the comments in this thread have hit the autofilters due to the nature of the discussion … we’re freeing them as fast as we can but a number of our mod crew are travelling or away for the holidays so please be patient.

rumi (169) — I suspect that info from MSNBC is stale by now; I don’t know about you, but I don’t get mortgage or financing spam any more. I get plenty of spam, too, something in the ballpark of a couple hundred pieces a day across a couple of email accounts a day.

I still get a crapload of drug spam, though, and spam for penny stocks — about a 5-to-1 ratio, drugs to financial scams.

I think the basic principle is still fresh. The goal is not to sell products advertised by spam but to sell data and it’s the data commerce that needs to be cleaned up for the benefit of consumers.

That’s why I look at targeting the ones who profit. Any other measure of control is temporary because new ways are constantly evolving to get around controls.

I still get a crapload of drug spam, though, and spam for penny stocks — about a 5-to-1 ratio, drugs to financial scams.