A Day Without SPAM

I’m sure I’ll be proved wrong later in the day, but right now marks the first day in more than six years that I’ve opened up my email program and not found any SPAM in it. ‘How did you accomplish that?’ you may be asking, and I’ll tell you. I set up email filters by IP and domain on my webhost’s mail server, I dropped a few email addresses that were being continuously spammed so any mail to them now bounces, I dropped off most of the mailing lists I was on (when they’d allow me to opt-out), I set up wPoison on my domain’s webpages to trap spambots who harvest email addresses, I took actions to protect my email addresses that appear on those pages, and I dutifully report all SPAM to SpamCop.

Yes, folks, -this- is what it takes to have one SPAM-free day online. Quite frankly, I think it takes too much effort for the end user to accomplish such a feat, and we should have better tools and resources on our side. Personally, I would love to be able to collect, say, $50-$500 per SPAM email from the companies that encourage such practices through their product offerings and affiliate programs, and an additional $50 per such message from the actual spammer (regardless if they lived in Nigeria or Southeast Asia), and have that payment enforced through electronic fund transfer to my PayPal account BEFORE it appeared in my Inbox. That would be their cost of doing business with me without my soliciting such business. That would fund my website content and pay for webhosting and my online access fees through my ISP.

I would also like to be able to tell my mailserver which emails are from people I want to hear from so that their emails would not generate a charge or a blocking/bouncing response. I also don’t think I should have to pay for service like that since I am not the one who encouraged spammers to use the networks the way they do. Do not make the victims of the crime pay the price of stopping their victimization, make the criminals pay it instead.