SPAM, the unwanted communication you get in your email and on your website, is not solely a technological problem. Yes, we need tools that better prevent it and block it, but at the core we need to understand why it's being sent in the first place.
Believe it or not SPAM works. Think about it. There has to be an economical reason for it to succeed. People are making money off of it so they continue to do it.
So how does it make money? Well first it makes money because most of the infrastructure costs are externalized. Spammers use other people's servers to do their nasty work. Just last week we had a form exploited on a website we built. We let down our guard for a single page on the Internet and within 12 hours 10,000 emails had been sent through our mail server. Now we're left to clean up the mess of being blacklisted by certain hosts, etc.
It doesn't cost much/anything to send emails. Unlike paper spam (flyers) emails are free produce and distribute. You don't need to make much of a return to justify hitting the send button.
People click the links and buy the products. It's true. We've seen enough 60 Minutes Episodes of people loosing their fortunes to Nigerian scams to know that people are falling hook, line, and sinker for SPAM.
The solution - Sadly there is none. I used to think that a financial exchange would work. The premise being that most people send as many emails as they receive. Financially that would even out for most people and essentially be free. That model sounds great but it breaks down on Internet content and other forms of online communication. The Internet is free and will continue to be.
It's like the War on Drugs except no one really wants SPAM. You still have your dealers, you still have rogue countries housing and producing the supply, you still massive amounts of money moving around. What you don't have is junkies and crack addicts.
Fight the war. Like the war on drugs, which probably is a failure, it needs to be fought at multiple levels.
- Political pressure needs to be placed on known countries that are allowing this industry within their borders.
- It needs to be made illegal. If you setup a system to call every phone at every business every day multiple times over you know you would be arrested for something.
- Doors need to be kicked in, SWAT teams need to be deployed, and the shit needs to be scared out of the spammers.
- You need to stop being a spammer. It's mostly known as Search Engine Optimization and other voodoo marketing stuff. Stop it. It's not working for you and it's killing your business. Derek Powazek has a great post on this.
- Most importantly we need to educate the masses about SPAM. Public service announcements showing what spam is and the horrors it brings to the world. If we can make Sally Arkansas understand what these emails are then her and her brother Manitoba Bob will be less likely to click on them and order a fake Rolex.
Comments
Deane - October 16, 2009 10:08 AM
I gotta tell you, since I started using GMail two years ago, spam has become a non-issue for me. To the point that when I read the beginning of this post, I was thinking, "Spam...is that still a problem?"
Justin MacLeod - October 20, 2009 8:35 PM
I second Deane's comment... g-mail just kills spam. I have thousands of spam messages in there, no worries. In several years of g-mail I've only missed 2-3 legit messages - definitely worth it!
Dan James - October 20, 2009 10:45 PM
I also have to agree. Spam filtering has become much better on the server side of things. I don't get a lot of spam making it through the multiple levels of filtering I have in place without gmail.
What I was getting at was the sheer effort involved in making sure that end users (i.e gmail users, web users, etc) lives are spam free. You guys are both in the tech side of things. Does spam consume any of your time on the hosting/developing/maintaining side of things? We have had to build captcha's or akismet into all of our forms. if we let one thing go it's often hammered by spammers within a few minutes.
For some of our sites we employ moderators who have to wade through hundreds of spam comments that have gotten through the captchas.
It was more on this side of thing that I was focussing on.
Justin MacLeod - October 23, 2009 8:30 AM
I hear ya Dan. I know myself personally when I was running Timeless, we made the decision to outsource our e-mail to larger organizations that are setup with very large scale to battle spam, hackers and other important issues such as maintaining availability and uptime. We found that the time money and effort to battle these things on our own simply wasn't worth what we thought was the 'independence' of running our own mail servers. What I see happening is as more companies make these decisions and the larger firms like G-mail and others handle more and more of our email, it will make it harder and harder for spammers to get through their defenses, making SPAM have a much more prohibitive cost-benefit. It will never be completely eliminated but will become less and less effective.
I see your decision on ClusterShot to utilize Amazon's cloud service as a similar decision. Take advantage of the massive infrastructure that can easily scale. When at all possible use others that specialize in a service. Forget about SPAM and let others handle it!
We made the same decision with our entire web hosting infrastructure as well and never looked back. Our uptime went up, our headaches went down, and web server hackers were battled by a firm we outsourced to that specialized in that area. This left us able to focus on our core competencies. With web and email server technologies constantly evolving we decided we were not going to be server administrators, but rather developers.
Just my 2 cents! J
Patricia - November 21, 2009 4:36 PM
I agree with Deane. I had no problems regarding spam using Gmail, and it's been 6 years now. The best part is when you get to the "Spam" folder and you click on delete then you get the cool "Hoooorray no spam!" sign or something like that.
Anyway, I work at gambling industry and spam is a big deal when you want to do things the right way and your competition is not helping spamming everywhere, it really gets frustrating but I also noticed that spam filters are getting better so...it's a though call. Bye and lots of kisses to all