siliconglen

The thread started with the right intentions but ran out of steam without a reasonable solution. I was also going to sign the petition but the page is no longer there. I realised people may be a bit reluctant to sign a petition, I have one hosted by petition online. If you read the associated page

The Spam Petition

Then the actual petition you’ll see that by embarrassing the industry into action (11 years and its still a problem and look at what else has been achieved) then proposing a free, open source solution that establishes a decent spam filter for all it’s moving forward the tools people can use to fight spam. SpamAssassin is a great tool, however it isn’t always easy to access it and it would be better if the spam wasn’t on the Internet to start with.

While universal easy and free access to a powerful server side spam filter (that doesn’t use challenge response) is a useful step, the real way forward is to block spam at source and for that legislation is only one of a range of tools and personally I believe that technology is the main tool here. By shifting the emphasis from filtering at the recipient to trying to block spam at source hopefully it will start more people thinking along these lines. There are already some tools here but they are few and far between and only begin to scratch the surface.

Anyway, I hope you find the petition interesting and if you want to sign it then I thank you for your support.

Craig