Spam Wars: Revisions, Part 1
As you all know, I've been doing some work to try and find a way to shut down spam here in Utah. After some feedback on the original proposal and some requests from Sen. Niederhauser, I've come up with the first update of the proposed law. (Sorry about the lack of copy/paste, but the formatting seems to get lost during that process.) As usual, any constructive feedback is appreciated.
As part of this process, I did some research on why spam is such a problem. For starters, did you know that now over 95% of all email is spam? Or that 20% of all IT spending is dedicated to security including fighting viruses and phishing attacks conducted via email? Or how about the Denver law firm that missed a court date due to an over-aggressive spam filter? They later paid a court-imposed fine for it. You can get even more facts on spam from it's Wikipedia article including the national cost of spam. (It's around $13B annually if you were wondering. That works out to about $105M for Utah.) It doesn't take a lot of research to see how widespread and costly the problem can be.
If you think this is something worth pursuing, please send a copy of this proposed law to your legislators and ask them to work with Sen. Niederhauser to clean it up and bring it to the floor for a vote.
Jesse
Shauna
It took me a while to fully digest this, but I’m on board and I will be sending it to Rep Cosgrove and Sen Davis.
We just got a new spam filter at work that you could say was a little on the over-agressive side.
You see, the payrolls I process are sent to me via email from plants all over the country and an entire plant almost didn’t get paid because their payroll went to my spam folder. Luckily, I caught it in time and the crisis was averted, but how pissed would you be if you didn’t get your paycheck because of an over agressive spam filter?
Using email for business-critical comms is very problematic since it’s not point-to-point. FTP would be a better choice for moving your big files…you can virtually “see” the package delivered and check its size to verify accurate transmission.
True, but trying to get Joe Six-Pack using FTP? That’s an even scarier thought!