Treating the Symptom, and Ignoring the Cause
Earlier in the year I wrote (in the article "Challenging Stupidity") about my frustration with the increasing number of idiots who implement challenge/response e-mail filtering to mitigate the junk e-mail problem in their own (or their users') in-box(es). Of course that is only a recent development in the fight to treat the symptoms of junk mail whilst letting the spammers get away scot free to keep on peddling their services, and profiting from their immoral abuse of the infrastructure we all underwrite.
For reasons I simply cannot fathom, there seems to be an over-arching antipathy toward actually combatting the cause - the spammers themselves. When it all started in a decade ago 1995 in with sleazy American immigration lawyers posting an ad for their services to "enhance" the chances of success in that year's Green Card lottery, most people claimed it as a one-off, suggesting that the few who kicked up a fuss were making a mountain out of a mole-hill, advising them to move on. The majority simply didn't see the need to deal with the issue. The lawyers got rapped knuckles from their ISP, promised never to do it again. Then (sticking in very lawyerly fashion to the letter of their promise) promptly wrote a book about "Internet marketing" encouraging others to do it instead. Many did. So much for a one-off.
Then some bright spark hit on the idea of harvesting e-mail addresses from the newsgroups (which in those days were still largely accurate), and sending their junk in bulk e-mail runs. Again it was only a minority who complained at first. The popular response was that it was only an occasional junk mail, and "you do have a delete key, you know". What did it matter if there was a tiny fraction of junk mail around.
No matter how many sensible and honourable people there are, human nature dictates that there will be some who will exploit any advantage, and the cheapness of junk e-mail was just such an advantage. Those attitudes allowed spammers and their junk e-mail to flourish. As we all know, junk e-mail accounts for a staggering 90-odd per cent of all contemporary e-mail traffic. Belatedly, there have been frantic efforts to alleviate the problem. Filtering systems were created that first blindly, then intelligently, recognised the common aspects of junk mail consigning it to the virtual dustbin. The trouble is that such systems cannot afford to generate false positive detections which result in legitimate e-mail being discarded, and consequently have to be very specific in their detection. This was a chink that the spammers could exploit, once again, ultimately causing the problem to grow as the spammers introduced more and more extraneous junk into their e-mails in order to get their payload past the filters. The end result has been the vicious circle of "better mouse trap, smarter mouse".
With the partial failure of filtering other methods have been adopted. Of those the most aggravating - sorry, the second most aggravating (challenge/response filtering being the most aggravating) of these strategies is the blanket black-listing of pools of internet addresses. The assumption goes something like this: if you are using ISP X's service to connect through then you should be routing your outgoing e-mail through ISP X's outgoing mail relay; if you are using ISP Y's connection service then you should be routing mail through ISP Y's outgoing relay. That is all very well when you only use the services of one ISP, but what about those of us who use multiple ISPs and cannot be re-configuring their mail services every time they call up a different one? It used to be that e-mail transport operated in such a way that the sender started a message directly on it's way to the recipient. There is elegant (and efficient) simplicity in that, and without spammers there would have been no need to change it.
Surely the time has come to stop burying heads in the sand and to deal directly with the problem of spammers themselves. Every time an attempt is made to deal with the symptom, the spammers find a way around it. It is time to do what should have been done at the get go. Eradicate the problem at source. The spammers need to be cut off at the knees (figuratively speaking). Back-trace the spam to its source. Shut it down. Isolate the offending server. If an ISP chooses to continue supporting a spammer or provides them with a new home (turn "black hat" in the vernacular of spam hunters), isolate them entirely. The very nature of the Internet means that it isn't easy, and it requires broad agreement amongst the responsible ISPs to achieve a complete and total block, but it can be done. There is a risk of fragmenting the Internet into digital ghettos of the sleazy, but that has to be better than laying the inconvenience on the shoulders of the innocent victims. Deal with the miscreants directly, then legitimate users like me can get on with using the 'Net the way it was intended - with ease.
