Email Spam

I'm not gonna give everyone a history lesson on how long email has been around and when the Internet began popular with the public. Suffice it to say long enough that we should have some solid laws for punishing spammers. And not just those based in the U.S. We've had enough time that global policies should be in place. It's not my place to determine what the extent of punishment should be, but obviously fines aren't working for the very small percentage of spammers that our laws allow us to prosecute.

Furthermore, I think prosecuting the spammers is pretty similar to killing the messenger. It's been done before and no one seems to think its wrong, but in the end he was still only the messenger. To solve the issue and end the war you have to target his master. It's time we start taking down the businesses that are hiring the spammers to begin with.

This has been an issue for a long time, so why the rant now? Because I read an article over at ars technica that says estimates indicate that 2007 will be the year that spam messages out number person to person emails. Is spam the most important thing going on in the world right now? Not even close, but it does impact millions of users and buisnesses every single day. And that I think is deserving of some better support from our law makers.