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Martin MC Brown's picture
Martin MC Brown

Computing From the Front Lines

Spam filtering hit by legal issues

The legal issues that are affecting the Spamhaus are heating up. If Spamhaus were shut down, even temporarily, then the increase in spam that makes it around the Internet would be significant.

Regardless of the figures and the discussions (including those on the Slashdot page for the story), any increase in spam would be a bad thing.

I don't know what your email statistics are like, but for me about 98% of all the email I received in the last year is spam. An increase of any kind would be bad and there's been a recent splurge of spam in my inbox that has required some changes and improvements to my filters and techniques.

Whatever the legal issues, and how they are resolved, we need as a worldwide community to get a better handle on stopping spam and its causes.

What People Are Saying

EY has a good point - but

EY has a good point - but since so many spammers use your effort to be a good net citizen to increase the amount of spam you receive (most ignore your request to be deleted from their email lists, and pass your email address to others as a confirmed hit!!) I won't unsubscribe anymore for fear of making thinks worse. I don't want people calling my cell phone with their ads, and the same for my email. I pay for those systems - I want it so no-one may use them to advertize to me without my express permission - not the case today.

If Spamhaus had better due

If Spamhaus had better due process, a better appeals process, I doubt they would have gotten sued. They, and many other blacklists, take a stance of "guilty until proven innocent, although there is no way to prove your innocence". Which is hardly fair to businesses legitimately trying to use email. I've seen people sign up to receive mail from a business, you know, opting in, then using a filter to mark it as spam. That makes no sense at all and hurts the business for no reason.
Getting rid of spam is a good cause, but often, not done fairly.