Stop Treating The Symptoms, or How To Reduce Spam

We've all been reading about how folks are fed up with spam. I receive 2 spams for every legitimate e-mail (And I receive a lot of e-mail daily). I use spamassassin and just let it send all the garbage to /dev/null. I may loose one or two legitimate e-mails per week, but I don't have time to go through all those hundreds to find the one or two false positives.

But for me, it's not so much the amount of spam as it is its effect on bandwidth I pay for. And since I run several mail servers, this is a significant issue to me. But I take a slightly different view of what should be done.

The large majority of the spam I have seen (and still see because spamassassin isn't 100%) comes from a spammer, but a spammer who's been paid by someone else to get their message out. The message isn't from the spammer himself, it's from someone wanting to sell me something. So while I feel spammers deserve to spend the rest of their miserable lives rotting in jail, I don't think they should be the primary target (except in the cases of fraud).

The link for this article located at LinuxAndMain is no longer available.