Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:48:19 +0200, David wrote:
Il Tue, 1 Sep 2009 11:50:14 +0200, Andre Engels ha scritto:
What about mailing lists? There exist well-functioning mailing lists
with thousands of subscribers. Being a posting member of those will
significantly increase your internet bill under your proposal.
It's an implementation issue, it doesn't touch the sense of proposal.
One possibility is register the mail list to official registers and mail
from a subscriber to other subscribers will be excluded from taxation or
will have a lower tax rate.
An excessive mailing from a single or few subscribers can be easily
detected, traced, filtered and, if the case, prosecuted.
This can be done already, without the need for an email tax. ISPs could
easily detect spammers, if they cared to.
There are a few things that can already be done to cut the spam problem
to manageable size:
(1) Why aren't ISPs blocking port 25 for home users by default? My home
ISP does, I can only send email through their mail server unless I ask
them nicely, in which case I'd be responsible for any spam that leaves my
home network. If I send spam, I'll be breaking my terms of service.
(2) Why aren't ISPs cutting off detected spam bots? Owners of zombied PCs
are menaces to society. ISPs are in the best position to detect PCs which
are spamming, and alert the owner. If no action is taken in a week, warn
the owner that they're in breach of their terms of service, and if the
behaviour persists, cut the owner off until they clean up their PC.
Repeat offenders should be banned.
The preferred option these days is to slow down net access of the
offenders, not cut them off completely. I'm not sure how many ISPs
actually do that yet.
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