This is somewhat a continuation of one of my previous entries regarding the creativeness of virus spreading, but this one is geared entirely to junk email. Spam is just part of using the internet. If you spend more than a miniscule amount of time on the internet, you are eventually going to get spam. Perhaps you have a garbage email address that you use when completing online forms, so that you never see the spam, but I am sure that you are getting spam somewhere. I have never liked spam, but it has never really bothered me too much, I just delete it and don't worry about it. It has just gotten extremely out of hand lately. I am getting about 100 messages a day on one of my accounts, and about 50 on another. Most of it is the typical type spam, which you may or may not have seen, stuff like "earn money on ebay", "Viagra now available by mail", "Make your member grow 3 inches in a week" type crap. Now, I can see a possible market for these type of services, who doesn't want to make a little extra money. But when I began receiving spam about dealing with menopause, that really began to get on my nerves. I am a male in my mid 20's, what the hell do I care about dealing with menopause? It is when I began receiving these emails is when I began to start thinking how the idea proposed by Microsoft and Yahoo to require postage for emails was a good idea. Frankly, I love this idea, although it would need to be tailored a bit more. I don't feel that home users and even real businesses should be paying postage for every email they send. I actually don't feel they should have to pay for most of their emails. For example; You want to send an email to your friends Mary and Joe, you send it and the mail servers send it on through like nothing had changed, no postage required. Now notice that I said "most" emails, I personally believe that chain letters should be included in the postage requirements. Sending jokes along is one thing, but sending the same crappy, "if you are a true friend, you'll send this back" emails that you forwarded 3 months ago, just because it made the rounds again is rediculous. I may be a good friend to you, but I'll be damned if I send it back to you and perpetuate the thing. I am doing my part to stop the chain, if only more people would do the same, as in this case, 1 person doesn't make that much of a difference. The same thing goes for "virus warnings", do you really think Microsoft is going to send out an email warning about a virus? Do you think Microsoft actually cares about a virus going around, other than enough to try and patch Windows, I don't. Most of these are just merely hoaxes that are created to do the same thing as chain letters, which is clog up the internet and scare users. Do us all a favor, before you forward that warning that if we open that email our tv will stop working if we use cable internet or whatever the damn thing says, check it out to see if it is a hoax first. I am sure it is probably a hoax that has been circulating the net in various forms for at least a couple years, if not more. I know that we cannot impose our postage requirement on the rest of the world, and I don't feel we need to, they can adopt the same policies if they wish.
Here's how I see this working:
Any email that is of the commercial nature, and I mean trying to sell you something, this is much different than Joe from Company A sending a business related email to Frank at Company B. I am referring to the emails that are trying to sell you those prescription drugs, or that CD to learn to sell on Ebay. The absolute garbage emails. If that email does not have the required postage (I would suggest 2-3 cents each), then the mail server deletes the message. The servers can scan the messages looking for series of keywords which are in most spam messages. I know 2-3 cents does not sound like much, and it really isn't, but when the spammers are sending out thousands or millions of messages to anybody that they can get an address for, then their postage bill will begin to get large. It would at least make it so that they will actually have to think about who they are sending them to and actually target their audiences appropriately. I just cannot consider these spam originators as a legitimate business, as a legitimate business does not have to send their product through multiple sources to mask the origin.
In order to require postage on the pesonal emails, that are classified as chain letters, should be quite simple to perform. A postage rate must be set, and since most people only send them to a handful of individuals, 2-3 cents each would not be much of a deterrent, so the rate might have to be a bit higher, like 5 cents each. This is the same philosophy as the USPS and bulk rate postage. It would still not break the bank for most individuals to send the chain letter out, only $1 per 20 people, but might just deter them enough to to prevent them from indiscriminantly forwarding them to everyone in their address book. The fact that the user would also have to purchase the postage, might prove to be enough of a hassle to help prevent constant forwarding of the same message. Although it may be a bit difficult to identify the chain letters that are sent by individuals, but a good start would be any emails that contain the text "send to at least 5 of your friends" is a good place to start. As people begin to eliminate those words from the message, the system could be updated to include phrases that are included in the ones that are circulating the net as defined by the council that oversees the spam postage, paid for by the spam postage.
You may think to yourself, why do you care so much, if you tell your friends not to send you the chain letters, then it shouldn't matter to you? Well, it does, these messages go across the same internet that I use, and go through the same mail servers that everybody else is using. This garbage is clogging up the net and slowing down the servers and pipelines that we are all trying to get real information from, and it is only getting worse. We can all get email filtering programs, tht will clean up the messages as we download them from the mail server, but they are still clogging up the internet in general. Even further to this, a number of spammers have begun using a few techniques to get by these programs, for example, leaving the sender and subject lines blank. It is very difficult to create a message rule for a message that "has no sender or subject". Many spammers have also been using replacement characters for parts of words, so that a computer which is looking for the term Viagra, will overlook the term V1agra or even V!agra. It's simple for a human to see that and figure it as spam, but a computer does not contain our sense of visualization, so it will think it is a legitimate email, unless you were to build a filter that contained every word that is being modified in such a manner. I use POPFile, which is a great self learning and it currently has over 8,000 unique words in the spam bucket alone, are you willing to create a rule with a word count of 8,000 words?
I know many of you will probably think I am completely off my rocker in my thinking that email postage is a good idea, or for just agreeing with Microsoft in general, but I am open to read and listen to any comments, critisism, or possible changes you might have in mind.
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