spam control again

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

Joe wrote:
| I was a little too wordy in my last emails so I think I need to hone down
| my point a little better. My contention is the anti-spam laws are not
| required to help fight spam and we should put our efforts into furthering
| knowledge of existing, effective solutions.

On a geek list like this, that's probably the most appropriate.

We might also note  the  very  practical  problem  that,  while  many
governments  are  starting to deal with spam, the samples so far show
that they invariable make a lot of exceptions.   First,  they  always
except  themselves, and usually all other government oagencies.  Then
they add all sorts of "worthy" organizations, notprofits, PACs,  etc.
And, of course, there is always the exception for businesses that you
already have a relation with.  ("Hey, josephc at etards.net just sent us
a nastygram complaining of our spam.  We now have a business relation
with him, so we can add him to our opt-in list." ;-)

The symptoms so far say that governments will maybe cut down on  spam
by a small amount, but they are more likely to be part of the problem
than the source of a solution.

So we're better off discussing what we can do well here: Devising and
installing technical solutions to the spam problem.