On my Royal Mail post, I talked about the road haulage industry externalising it’s costs. But there’s no “business” that externalises costs more than email spamming. And spam seems to be getting worse and worse, with the volume of spam increasing month by month. It’s all bottom-feeding garbage, mostly of dubious legality.
Dorothea Salo and Lawrence Simon both have things to say on the subject, Dorothea in particular points out one of the external costs of spam.
I send just about every spam I get sent to spamcop.net, which deciphers the headers, does lookups on the spamvertised websites, and sends automatic complaint letters. But even this feels like bailing water out of a sinking ship with a saucepan. There has to be a better way.
I don’t think sending complaints, or more aggressive filtering on their own are going to solve the problem. Seems to me that spam won’t be stopped (or at least reduced to manageable proportions) until the spammers are forced to pay the costs that spam imposes on the rest of us.
Perhaps what we need is some kind of law allowing individuals, companies and ISPs to sue both spammers and the rogue ISPs that host them to recover the costs imposed. Given the international nature of spam (much of mine seems to come from China), it would either need similar laws in many countries, and probably international treaties as well. Is such a thing feasible? I don’t know.