Alright, I've had it. I am not a violent person but each day I get literally (no joking) over 300 spam messages per day. I know I'm not alone and yet very few realistic solutions seem to exist for combating it.

I really do think that some really basic laws could be in place to protect people against it. There are different types of spam out there and I'd be happy if the hard core definitive spam could just be stopped. When I send out Stardock Magazine, a magazine that users have to specifically subscribe to, we get emails from spam cop that claim that we're spam. Spam assassin has sent us notes claiming that the email verification that is sent when a user creates an account is spam. (Of course, based on their definition of spam, Spam Cop and Spam Assasin are sending out spam - unsolicted email!). Those things are definitely solution.

That leads me to the next thing I've tried, Spamnet. It sounds good in theory but in practice it has made me feel like some privacy freak has hijacked my email. All the things I've subscribed to get marked as spam and while I can unmark it as spam, it gets tedious having to do that on every thing I subscribe to, especially when you get as much spam as I do.

The spammers themselves though are of course the problem. They have no decency. In my book they're borderline criminals.

In an email I received today from: FLORETTA RODRIGUE it had a subject line in it of "This is the stuff I mentioned" and what do I see when I click on it? Porn with an ad for herbal viagra. This got marked as spam so but because I end up having to go through my spam folder looking for legitimate email now and then, it still annoys the heck out of me to see these. What if I was a kid? They don't know. I don't subscribe to any adult sites or anything else that would put me on a mailing list for pornographic material. This email came from Lima Peru (trace routed it).

Of course, getting to companies or people located in Hong Kong or Albania or whatever may be difficult. But something needs to be done.

I'm frustrated enough that I am really starting to think this is an area we should get into. I don't know how much money can be made on this sort of thing but I'm starting not to care. I do know that I don't like "collaborative" systems like spamnet. I don't systems like Mccaffee's where you're having to filter it on the server. I don't want to mess around with something being installed on the mail server. I want a program that is good enough to simply stop the definitive spam. It doesn't have to be 100% but enough where things that are almost certainly spam are stopped. Spam based on what they are, not because some privacy freak who thinks that email from ZDNet that they subscribed to but are too lazy to unsubscribe to is now spam (ironically, an anchordesk article that drooled all over spamnet was marked as spam).

What are your thoughts? What do you think can realistically be done about spam?