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Perhaps It Got Caught In His Spam Filter

Industry Minister Maxime Bernier, who has shown little appetite for the anti-spam legislation, now says that he is reviewing the 2005 Task Force Report on Spam (I was a member of the task force).  Bernier says he "just" received the report – it was obviously part of his ministerial briefing last winter – and will respond in a few weeks.  He goes on to say that he is not sure what the role of government should be and that "maybe the market will decide."  I'd suggest that now that he has received the report that he actually read it to learn how the "big group of experts" concluded that leaving it to the market will not solve the problem.

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6 Comments

  1. Charles Iliya Krempeaux says:

    Why not work on fixing Internet e-mail to get rid of SPAM instead of making it a crime?

    Because really… SPAM is a bug NOT a crime. And it’s a fixable bug at that.

    Details here…

    [ link ]

    — Charles

  2. Julien
    Charles, saying that spam is a bug implies that the email system is broken in some way. The way I see it, it isn\’t. It works perfectly.

    Unfortunately, however, it is under constant attack by spammers. Now people are working on battling it, as evidenced by the evergrowing RBLs and everevolving SpamAssassin and its kin.

    As for the \”pull\” system you link to in your blog, its quite an inefficient solution. For instance, I deal with alot of people who contact me out of the blue. It would thus be impossible, under the pull system, to get mail from them. Plus you say yourself its near impossible to implement.

    The viable solution is to make blatant abuses to the email system illegal. There\’s no reason why it shouldn\’t be illegal to not have functional Opt-outs.

  3. On being wrong
    To put it bluntly, both of you are wrong!

    Julien: if email worked perfectly, we wouldn’t have a spam problem. Email was not envisioned as a new advertising medium, and it is most definitely a system in need of fixing for people who receive spam. Also, I agree that spamming should be somehow legally punished, but that won’t make it go away.

    Charles: I can’t believe you wrote that whole thing without thinking to yourself that you haven’t solved the problem, AND you’re reinventing the wheel. To acheive the effects you describe, all someone has to do is block everyone, and add select senders to a whitelist. You may have noticed that people don’t do this, because it would block a lot of wanted mail, and it’s a pain to maintain this whitelist. You say this yourself in your blog entry:

    “You might also ask, but I’m a business, I need to receive e-mail from people I don’t know, how do I do that. Simple answer is, you don’t. But you don’t need to. You can receive messages from people you don’t know with a system other than pull e-mail.”

    That about sums it up. You’re basically saying here’s this wonderful thing we could do instead of email, but it doesn’t do what email does, so you’ll have to think of something else to actually replace email with. Good job, I await the coming pull email revolution.

    I would also like to add that making spam illegal most definitely does not remove anybody’s freedom of speech. The mere idea is ridiculous. If spammers can no longer speak through their spam, they’re welcome to publish their advertisements elsewhere. Not to be confused with real infringements of freedom of speech, where people won’t speak for fear of bodily harm or imprisonment. Spam just plain and simply not an acceptable way to publish anything, advertising or otherwise.

  4. Charles Iliya Krempeaux says:

    Re: Julien
    Hello Julien,

    As Simon also said, the existance of SPAM is in itself proof that our current e-mail system has a bug. And if it worked perfectly no one (including you) would have problem with SPAM.

    The pull e-mail system is NOT meant to replace all the uses that e-mail is used for today. However, it is meant to have all the features used by most e-mail users.

    Although I have not studied this thoroughly enough (so I could be basing this on premature conclusions), I have found that most people use e-mail to contact people who they already have relation with (such as friends, family, co-workers, colleagues) and mailing lists.

    From those that I stuidied most people don’t generally get e-mails from people or groups they don’t know and don’t have a relation with (other than SPAM).

    These type of people (who seem to be the majority) would loose absolutely nothing by moving to a pull e-mail system… and in addition to that there would be no SPAM.

    Making SPAM illegal and taking away yet more freedom is not necessary.

    — Charles

  5. Charles Iliya Krempeaux says:

    On being wrong
    Hello Simon,

    This solution solves the problem for the majority of people. As I already mentioned to Simon (and which I’ll include here too)….

    The pull e-mail system is NOT meant to replace all the uses that e-mail is used for today. However, it is meant to have all the features used by most e-mail users.

    Although I have not studied this thoroughly enough (so I could be basing this on premature conclusions), I have found that most people use e-mail to contact people who they already have a relation with (such as friends, family, co-workers, colleagues) and mailing lists.

    From those that I stuidied most people don’t generally get e-mails from people or groups they don’t know and don’t have a relation with (other than SPAM).

    These type of people (who seem to be the majority) would loose absolutely nothing by moving to a pull e-mail system… and in addition to that there would be no SPAM.

    Regarding reinventing the wheel and white listing with the currenct SMTP-based e-mail…. The problem with sticking to the SMTP-based e-mail is that bandwidth (and thus also money) will still be wasted with that system if SPAM is being sent. So although the user would not see the SPAM with SMTP-baed white listing… you’d still have the problem and cost of bandwidth being wasted from received SPAM. (Pull e-mail gets rid of that.)

    Regarding freedom of speech…. Freedom is something you either have or something which is forced away from you. If you imprison someone for SPAMing then you are taking away their freedom.

    While the law may say it is legal to do so, it does not change what you are doing.

    I am from the belief that forcing away freedom is bad. And thus it would be better to opt for a solution to the SPAM problem that does NOT do this.

    — Charles

  6. One benefit to “pull mail”
    While I disagree with Charles’s idea of entirely replacing push-mail with pull-mail (since I need new customers to contact me so I can earn a living), it does occur to me that it may provide one benefit: if pull-mail becomes the standard for home use (while businesses keep push-mail), then the market for spammers would be seriously crippled, and it might just stop being worthwhile. I think (most) business e-mail recipients are less likely to respond to spam than (most) home users too, further reducing spam’s chance to generate a profit.

    I also disagree that it’s not morally wrong to purposely disguise the purpose of your e-mail just to get it past the filters that you know people are using to try to prevent your crap from reaching them. It’s the equivalent of dumping a pile of trash on a “no dumping” sign – it annoys someone who’s stated they don’t want you to annoy them, and it forces them to spend their time and effort cleaning up your garbage. There should indeed be laws against spam, just as there are laws against selling tobacco to minors. Some minors still smoke, and some ignorant fools will still buy something as a result of spam they received, but we still need a law in place so we can stop the blatant abusers when we do catch them. And as for their “freedom of speech,” they have no more right to continue than does a man screaming through a megaphone at 2:00 AM in a quiet neighbourhood. If there wasn’t a law against that sort of thing, then someone would resort to stopping him physically, and the vast majority of the community would approve.

    If you imprison someone for serial killing, you are taking away their freedom. So should we set him free? I say one forfeits one’s right to freedom when one makes the decision to commit a crime against another.