Spam is and likely always will be a major part of our lives, at least in the computing universe. Yet this new wave of PDF spam is not something that is just affecting some of us – it’s nailing everyone. Even more interesting is how it is apparently affecting the stock market, at least with regard to human interpretation that is. In my humble opinion, I believe that we are fast approaching a time where a restrictive approach to PC security and email filtering is going to go from a benefit to a must have as our broadband pipes are going to be pushed to the max.
I hereby submit the following for your consideration, be it a little extreme, I see no other way around it.
PC Security: Maintaining my PC’s privacy is just as important as having a fence in my own backyard. It’s not that I have nothing to hide, but at the same time I do not wish to have anything running on my computer submitting reports back to a central office. Having said this, I believe that we can find a happy medium with manual or automatic security suite logs being sent into our ISPs for review. Again, control of when and if is a serious component here. However it is obvious to me that too many computers continue to run in the ‘buff’, with zero security in place.
The application I would suggest does NOT run in the background and only runs on a schedule if it is set to. It would run weekly, sort of like an anti-virus scanner and then prompt the user to submit a log (readable before being submitted) to our ISPs. If the application finds that the user’s security is not up to date, the ISP sends an automated prompt via the same application explaining that the user has X number of days to get this fixed. It should provide suggestions and resources to do so. Even perhaps including local techs in the area who might be able to help.
Now the reality check – this is very big brother. I dislike much about it, but at the same time – enough is enough. I am tired of all of these spam bot issues being blamed exclusively on the creators and distributors. If my plan was in place, it would stop this cold on the ISP networks who cared to implement this. Besides that, it also provides a value added service that ISPs can give to their customers, along with saving a ton of wasted bandwidth.
Email blocking: Because many other ISPs worldwide will never follow suite to the suggestions above, and I hardly blame them to some extent, the fact is that the spam problem is wildly out of control. My example with my own email is highly extreme, but the fact remains that 86.28% of my mail is junk.
The only thing I can think of here with regard to dealing with it is to ask the creators of both web based email and client based email systems to consider providing a ‘bounce back’ feature in all email options. In addition to this, make it a real pain to open up email marked as spam, this includes asking for a password for each message or providing a ‘report’ of the email message’s contents before allowing it to be opened up. Because let me tell you, simple spam filtering is a joke – I am talking to Gmail, Yahoo!, MSN, Microsoft Mail, Outlook, Thunderbird, Evolution and Kmail. Every developer out there needs to assign some real thought into providing us viable tools for fighting back.
[tags]spam,email,filtering email, junk mail[/tags]