bad ideas

Here are some bad ideas for how to fight spam; these tend to be complicated and/or ineffective.

1. Client integrated solutions seem nice on the surface, having spam handled directly within Outlook (or other email client). But in fact this is a very bad idea for these reasons:
   • Performance. Client integrated solutions usually download all messages. Why download the entire message if a spam is 10mb and you can tell up front it is spam?
   • Viruses. If spam gets to your email client at all (even stored in a special folder) it still puts you at risk of infecting your email client. Note that most viruses are spread by email, and no anti-virus software will ever be 100% accurate. The best approach is to prevent spam from ever touching your email client in the first place.
   • Offensive. Client integrated solutions result in spam messages in your email client (even if in special folders) whose images can be seen by you, and even whose offensive subjects can be seen by you when you are instead trying to work.
   • Cleanliness. Client integrated approaches clutter your email client, for example, you will have to purge your trash since it will be a mix of email you deleted from your friends, and spam you deleted. If on the other hand spam is managed outside your email client, you never need to purge your trash, as it is a record of all the emails you've deleted from your friends.
2. Complex software which asks the user lots of questions (what is your smtp server etc) and/or asks them to configure special filters or to setup special rules. These types of approaches might work for geeks, but they will fail the mass market.
3. Challenge-response mechanisms have the following problems:
   • Traffic on the Internet is doubled if all messages are challenged.
   • Rude - some senders are offended by you challenging them, and will not answer the challenge.
   • Loss - some senders do not understand the challenge and they ignore it
   • Delay - sometimes important email will be delayed to you, waiting until the senders confirms
   • Spammers are starting to answer challenges
4. Blacklisting a list of all "known spammers", so that you will never receive another email from them again. This will never work. The spammers will just keep sending spam from different places. You will constantly be chasing your tail, trying to keep up with them. This is way too much work, it will let lots of spam get through, and it will sometimes even kill legitimate email in case an innocent company sometimes mistakenly gets added to a blackhole list, which happens!
5. Complaining to an ISP about a spammer. This usually has little to no result, and is not worth the effort involved. (And lucky for you, you can rely on the fact that there are already thousands of people who do this.)
6. List removal. Most spam these days claim that they will remove your name from their list if you simply reply with the word "remove" in the subject or if you click a special "remove me" link at the bottom of the email. Don't do it. Many spammers use this information to confirm that your email address is valid, and when you try to do this, you end up getting even more spam.
7. Secret email addresses, trying to hide your real email address. Some anti-spam systems try to help with this by creating special "tagged" email addresses for you to use with each merchant, and restricting that address by being used only by that merchant (so they can not sell your address to a spammer) and/or only for a certain amount of time. This is a bad approach. You should have anti-spam technology which allows you to publish your real email address(es) anywhere you want on the web, without fear of spam.
8. Mail bombing the spammer by sending hundreds of emails to him to try to use up his resources. This is ineffective, and will potentially get you in trouble and/or simply anger the spammer against you.
9. Server-based approaches that require you to give your email account login and password information to some third party so they can check your email account from their server. This introduces security and reliability risks; an ideal solution would let you use only your current email providers and your own PCs.
10. Centrally-managed approaches are not personalized enough for the way that you like to manage your email. You should benefit from the work of a central group and even other users, but you need to have ultimate control yourself.
11. Batch mailbox pruning. Some anti-spam software acts like another email client, and it competes with your existing email client in trying to access your email server. This can result in sometimes having your real email client getting to your server before your spam filter does.
12. Legislation will continue to fail since businesses continue to hire large numbers of lobbyists to influence congress to avoid strong anti-marketing laws on claims of free speech and potential damages to the economy if they are limited in their abilities to do marketing. (See also.) Also, even if we ever got some laws with teeth, the spammers would just focus all their energies from offshore.
13. Whitelist-only approaches which let you receive email only from people in your address book, requiring you to setup and manage the "whitelist". This can result in missing important emails from friends not yet on your whitelist, or missing messages from mailing lists you like, or from merchants you use.
14. Required content filtering management, having you constantly trying to keep a "bad words" filter up to date (not fun). You will again be chasing your tail, always trying to stay one step ahead of the spammers, who will constantly be changing their message, or coming up with new wordings/spellings for their wares. This can also result in sometimes removing good messages.

Back to Paul's spam page.