Spamming is cheap

For as long as costs of mailing out large and very large numbers of messages remains very low, spam will continue to be the least expensive way to advertise anything - ink for printers, penis enlargement kits, pornography, ..., even antispam tools. If methods of fighting spam are to be effective, they must include mechanisms by which costs of spamming increase significantly and/or effects of spamming are reduced, hopefully to nil.

The main costs of sending spam seem to be in:

1. acquiring valid email addresses to send spam to, and
2. finding ways to hide true identities of spammers, so they would not be traced and persecuted in one way or another.

To see how you can increase the first cost, click on impede harvest under advice. The second cost depends on how well or how badly mail and proxy servers are secured against being misused rather than on what Internet users might do to protect themselves against spam. The users can only track down hosts from which spam comes (see eg. OpenRBL), and:

• complain to the corresponding domain administrators - chances are the spammer's account will be cancelled and/or servers will be secured,
• submit the host's address to one or more black list maintainers, see eg. Joergen Mash's list checker - servers using the black lists will reject mail coming from that address.

The users, however, can reduce or even bring down to nil the amount of spam in their mail boxes, see filter incoming mail and white list under advice.

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