No, I don't think it's as simple as this. We are faced with a
mentality that views the Internet as gold mine, ready for the
plucking. When you consider the number of advertising agencies that
exist worldwide, most of whom do not (yet) spam, I think we are faced
with the tip of the iceberg. Imagine wading through a thousand junk
mails per day, searching for the ten messages you actually wanted to
receive. A number of spammers and their ISPs have already developed
techniques to get around automatic filtering. If the Internet
community were to filter out spam en masse (with filter lists
maintained by each recipient), we would see the widespread use of
these techniques by spammers (such as random From: and Reply-to:
addresses), and we would be back where we started from.
This is not about getting mad, or even. This is about creating an
Internet environment where spamming is not profitable. At the moment
spammers put the costs of advertising on the victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
recipients (we spend time wading through junk and pay for receipt of
said junk). We need to place the costs back on the advertisers, by
forcing them to manually read each message they receive and determine
which is a genuine potential customer and which is not. Sadly, as
always, the most effective measures are economic.
Anyway, let's not clutter up the list with this discussion.
Regards,
Richard....