[cumbria_lug] Proposal for dealing with spam

[Jen Phillips]

I've noticed one nice little trick PlusNET use to prevent their accounts being 
used to send spam, which is to put a very brief delay in between each message 
sent in one go, with that delay increasing for every message. If I sent two 
or three in a batch, it takes no time at all. If I sent ten at a time, it 
starts to get noticeably slower towards the end. It makes no real difference 
to me as a user, but it does make it impossible for me to send large amounts 
of spam quickly without sitting here stopping & re-starting the send to get 
it going at a decent speed again. While this wouldn't stop people using other 
ISPs, their own sending programs and the numerous open relays, I thought it 
was a very good way of preventing PlusNET accounts being used and cutting 
down on how much zombie spam can be sent through their system.

I don't think making it illegal to buy from spammers will come anywhere near 
solving the problem, but it may help. Anything that can make a spammer's life 
more difficult and less lucrative will help.

I suspect the easiest and most effective way of stopping spam being such a 
problem would be spam filters being provided as a standard part of any ISP 
package. Spam filters are available, and some of them are very good (I get 
about 50-100 a day straight into "trash" and only one or two in my inbox). 
The reason these aren't doing the job is that not enough people have them. 
The only way to get enough people to have them is make it a standard default 
setting. If BTInternet, Hotmail, AOL, Freeserve, etc all included spam 
filtering as part of the standard package, and the default setting was to 
just not deliver obvious spam at all, the problem would be cut in half. The 
amount of spam being delivered to the average user would drop considerably, 
meaning that not only were those inboxes not infested, but the users 
_couldn't_ be fooled into buying stuff, making it less worth sending.

Hugs,

Jen