| It's
a sad state of affairs as spam overtakes all of
our email boxes and literally costs Americans
billions of dollars a year. It's an endless
war that seemingly has no end and no way to combat
it. This battle that's being fought has many
soldiers, but few who really know how to win the
war. So far there isn't a solution.
There are numerous
companies and organizations on the internet that
have recently cropped up with their own version of
a solution to the spam problem. A couple of
the more well known versions of this are SpamCop
and SpamHaus. Many of these have created criteria
that they determine to figure out what is spam and
what is not. They create these policies and
procedures using their own formula. They
then go out and try to convince the public that
they are the authority on stopping spam and
attempt to bring people under their umbrella to
sign up for their services. As the public joins
and their membership grows, so does their
power. Is this a good thing or is this a bad
thing?
We have found that
in general this is a bad thing. We realize
that the intentions of these companies are good,
but the end results are not. The systems
they setup to block spam are flawed. There
really isn't a perfect solution so they create
what they feel is the best they can do... a happy
medium that can have serious repercussions.
Some of what they
do are things like "blacklist" servers
that have lots of spam going through them.
Okay, you say that's a good thing. Well, not
really. On every server there are literally
thousands of customers. When one customer
violates the spam laws, the rest of the people on
that server may have to pay for it. That's
not cool. How would you like it if your
email was blacklisted by one of these companies
for what someone else did? Your emails
wouldn't go through and you'd have no way to
combat it. That's a violation of our
freedoms!
Unfortunately,
these companies are creating a power base that
is unregulated and people across the world are
falling into their pit. In the long run,
they create a form of censorship that may be
detrimental to the freedoms that we all
enjoy. If you are considering joining one of
these services, we'd like you to think
twice. Just because you are frustrated with
too much spam doesn't mean you should choose one
of these options. Choose freedom over
censorship!
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