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1) A better mail transfer protocol. I don't view spam as inherently inevitable, but with SMTP it seems to be. 2) Internationalization from the ground up. Dom

by maw 19y ago

1) A better mail transfer protocol. I don't view spam as inherently inevitable, but with SMTP it seems to be. 2) Internationalization from the ground up. Domain names are still effectively limited to 7 bit ASCII (even though "dots" are represented by '\0's in the DNS, which doesn't rule out UTF-8, in practice it doesn't work well). I also still get mail I can't read, even when it's in a language I can, because of encoding issues (increasingly rare, but it still happens).

diego 19y ago
Spam makes its way into anything (search engines, social networks, blogs, twitter, you name it). In essence it's just low-quality advertising at an extremely low cost. Whatever makes it possible for people to communicate cheaply also enables spam. A "better" mail protocol would still have to be free, or very cheap. Snail mail is not free and you still get junk mail.
- cturner 19y ago
  How does spam make its way into twitter?
  - thaumaturgy 19y ago
    Spammers set up account and then mass-follow other accounts. See also http://mashable.com/2008/04/14/twitter-spam-out-of-control/ http://mashable.com/2008/04/14/twitter-spam-out-of-control/ and http://www.twitterspam.com/ http://www.twitterspam.com/ . I've never used Twitter, I just found those two links by Googling for "Twitter spam".
    - cturner 19y ago
      Thanks. I've been thinking about these problems recently (http://cratuki.blogspot.com/2008/04/blogs-as-email-replacement-mechanism.html http://cratuki.blogspot.com/2008/04/blogs-as-email-replaceme...), and twitter is the foremost model I've had in mind as an example of a spam-proof system! I still think the model is good. The follower spam problem described in those links (this too: http://www.stoptwitterspam.com/blog/about/ http://www.stoptwitterspam.com/blog/about/) is indeed spam but could be could be fixed without it breaking the essence of the twitter approach. I'm convinced that spam is a result of weaknesses in the model of the email system and not inevitable as you suggest. If we had our time again we would be able to standardise on a better model and for this reason was a bit surprised that you just accepted spam as part of life. The blog link at the top describes some of my thoughts. Models that involve variable payments work as well because they directly price on how much you want to be paid by people who waste your time. In such a world I'd love it for people to spam me.
      - thaumaturgy 19y ago
        I think you have me confused with someone else -- my first entry into this thread was my post above providing the links to information on Twitter spam. That said, I mentioned in another comment in another thread that I have to spend some of my time dealing with spam and all of its people effects on a pretty regular basis. I've also screwed around on the 'net since Mosaic, and dialed in to local BBSes before that (I started young :-). In my opinion, any form of two-way communication which allows anonymous entry will be vulnerable to spam. I certainly can't think of a workaround for that, and nobody else has managed to yet, either. I agree that Twitter spam has a good chance of being eradicated once they tighten things up a little. However, in part they have that chance because Twitter isn't fully bidirectional -- there's no way that I know of for a Twitter user to send messages to someone who hasn't signed up to follow the user.

by maw 19y ago

diego 19y ago

Spam makes its way into anything (search engines, social networks, blogs, twitter, you name it). In essence it's just low-quality advertising at an extremely low cost. Whatever makes it possible for people to communicate cheaply also enables spam. A "better" mail protocol would still have to be free, or very cheap. Snail mail is not free and you still get junk mail.

cturner 19y ago
How does spam make its way into twitter?
- thaumaturgy 19y ago
  Spammers set up account and then mass-follow other accounts. See also http://mashable.com/2008/04/14/twitter-spam-out-of-control/ http://mashable.com/2008/04/14/twitter-spam-out-of-control/ and http://www.twitterspam.com/ http://www.twitterspam.com/ . I've never used Twitter, I just found those two links by Googling for "Twitter spam".
  - cturner 19y ago
    Thanks. I've been thinking about these problems recently (http://cratuki.blogspot.com/2008/04/blogs-as-email-replacement-mechanism.html http://cratuki.blogspot.com/2008/04/blogs-as-email-replaceme...), and twitter is the foremost model I've had in mind as an example of a spam-proof system! I still think the model is good. The follower spam problem described in those links (this too: http://www.stoptwitterspam.com/blog/about/ http://www.stoptwitterspam.com/blog/about/) is indeed spam but could be could be fixed without it breaking the essence of the twitter approach. I'm convinced that spam is a result of weaknesses in the model of the email system and not inevitable as you suggest. If we had our time again we would be able to standardise on a better model and for this reason was a bit surprised that you just accepted spam as part of life. The blog link at the top describes some of my thoughts. Models that involve variable payments work as well because they directly price on how much you want to be paid by people who waste your time. In such a world I'd love it for people to spam me.
    - thaumaturgy 19y ago
      I think you have me confused with someone else -- my first entry into this thread was my post above providing the links to information on Twitter spam. That said, I mentioned in another comment in another thread that I have to spend some of my time dealing with spam and all of its people effects on a pretty regular basis. I've also screwed around on the 'net since Mosaic, and dialed in to local BBSes before that (I started young :-). In my opinion, any form of two-way communication which allows anonymous entry will be vulnerable to spam. I certainly can't think of a workaround for that, and nobody else has managed to yet, either. I agree that Twitter spam has a good chance of being eradicated once they tighten things up a little. However, in part they have that chance because Twitter isn't fully bidirectional -- there's no way that I know of for a Twitter user to send messages to someone who hasn't signed up to follow the user.