I have talked about fighting Spam several times in the past weeks from a administrators perspective. I have also discussed the success I have had during beta testing of a smtp server enhancement from Santronics Software Inc. that has reduced spam from 85-90% before it is allowed to be sent to my server.
On the legislative front the jury will be out for a long time on whether the Can-Spam bill will help stop some spammers from sending mail in the first place. In my personal opinion using statistics to prove my points of view think about this. I have one of my low traffic domains running the enhanced smtp server the on-going beta testing shows that 85-90% of the incoming spam comes from spooffed address’s. The column in the statistics you want to look at is the from percentages. Even though I am killing 85-90% of the spam based upon a callback test that verifies whether the e-mail account is spoofed or not. On top of that we are still seeing a percentage of spam originating from open relays and machines that are sending e-mail from computers that have been hacked into and setup to relay messages.
Only a small percentage possibly 5% of spammers use commercial services to send e-mail. Congress may help reduce spam up to 5% as the commercial services in the US will have to comply. But most will just move their operations off shore and stick out their middle finger.
My modest prediction is that the can-spam legislation will reduce current spam levels by 2-3% at best.
The legislation also opens loopholes for spammers, I have told my users to ignore the opt-out disclaimer at the bottom of Spams as it is only going to verify your address and cause you to get more spam. Most Internet users will be reluctant to opt-out for fear of getting on another list.
So this brings us back full circle only the people running e-mail services are going to continue to be the front-line soldiers on Spam. No congressional legislation is going to stop spammers from sending spam. Sure there will be a few token arrest but thats all it is going to amount to. We all are ultimately losers as Spam continues to increase as everyone from the national ISP to the guy that has a single T1 running into his garage and providing connectivity to a few neighbors are suffering from bandwidth congestion due to the high amount of spam traffic.
There is a huge amount of commentary on the Can-Spam bill and I thought it time to weigh in on my perspective. Again it’s my perspective but for someone that has been running e-mail servers longer than most people have been on the net then I think my opinion is quite valid.