[anti-abuse-wg] Why spam is abuse in several aspects

Spam is a plague that costs us a lot in time and money. 
It's the abuseive habit off sending ads and malware through stolen channels.

If spammers were running their own server and paying for their Internet access it would
be a lot less of a problem.  But as it is (and have been that last 10 years) compute
resources are stolen ( by breaking into personal computers and phones) and have
those innocent bystanders pay the cost. 

Spammers also use the stolen computers owners to pay for the Internet traffic, unknowingly. It also
conflicts with the users own use as the bandwitdh is eaten upp by the parasitic software
that spammers have inplanted.

A large part of the spam sent contains viral malware that keeps the spammers resources intact,
as computer owners clean their systems, spammers has to refresh their "inventory".

ISP's have part of this scam. Some, but not all, ISP ignores the spam traffic, in spite of
several methods available to detect and block. The end result is that people uses 
"deny-lists"  or public blocklists to block spam from ip addresses or ranges. As ISP
often uses DHCP for the client computers it won't help to block a single ip, one have
to block the ISP's whole range to prevent a single spammer from annoying.

Is SMTP wrong ? Certenly not. It's designed as an autonom and distributed method of 
sending messages. It's the very autonomous design that keps it from censorship and 
kommercial starnglehood.  The problem is that the "highways" has no police that stop 
speeders and roadpirats.


My wish is that spem should be considered as the terrorist status as it is, regarding
the amout of time it takes from our lifes, every day.


 
-- 
        Peter Håkanson   

        There's never money to do it right, but always money to do it
        again ... and again ... and again ... and again.
        ( Det är billigare att göra rätt. Det är dyrt att laga fel. )