Wed, 18 Feb 2004

In (Sort Of) Defense of Spammers

Below is a link to a great rant from Eric Allman (developer of Sendmail) on the economics of SPAM.

Fundamentally, the spam problem sucks eggs. A small number of greedy people are polluting a great medium for their own private benefit, regardless of the cost to the rest of the world. They run the risk of damaging their own medium (I think this falls into the class of "pissing into your own well") but they don't care—they are short-term thinkers. The problem is that our approach to the solution has also been short-term thinking. We have to think long-term. We have to make the spammers pay more than we do.

(link) [Slashdot]

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Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
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