You can make stats paint any picture you like.
Spam IS a real problem. Hell, I get on average about 2400 spams a day now. SpamAssassin takes care of most of them. A significant number still slip thru. What's worse is I occasionally miss a legitimate email that gets filtered and thrown out with the trash because I cant really manually scan 2000+ messages.
I'm unusual in that I have keep email addresses forever, my oldest is over 10 years old. Some are posted publicly too, so I get absolutely slammed.
Spam is unavoidable if you want customers, clients and/or friends to be able to easily find your email address. Spam is also an infrastructure challenge for major providers and ISPs. A provider such as Earthlink or Comcast has to maintain twice the SMTP and POP3 capacity that they would need for legitimate mail just to handle all of the unwanted spam.
I hate to add government involvement to anything though. Government is already too big. Spam ultimately needs to be addressed with technology. A good step toward solving the problem would be simply requiring email authentication and making the system spoof proof so the sender could always be identified and accountable.
|