The Spam Problem and how it affects EVERYONE.

Right now there are some VERY BAD BILLS in front of US congress that will LEGALIZE SPAM. That's right, right now, it's technically ILLEGAL in most states (like where I am in Illinois). California and Virginia have the toughest laws on the books making it a felony in Virginia. If the bills pass, the laws will supercede local laws giving spammers the right to sue ISP's for shutting them down for Acceptable Use Policy Violations. I don't know about you, but making them put "ADV:" in the subject line is not going to help the problem. Why? Might you ask? Read on...

As an ISP (of a mini-kind), I host email for other people. So it's MY server that the spammers will be connecting to, just like AOL or MSN or Yahoo. I have to store all this crap that I KNOW my users don't want. But still, it's going to fill the small hard drive space I run my system on which normally is MORE than enough for everyone I handle email for.

With SPAM becoming legal, I'm guessing I would have to have EVERY user sign an agreement that they want me to tackle the spam problem at the server level as they wouldn't want me to start putting limits on their accounts (like Yahoo and MSN and AOL do of so many megabytes per mailbox) as I would have to do without blocking spam at the server. I would have to otherwise or the spammer could SUE ME for not accepting their "LEGAL" spam. What's with that? Someone suing me to accept something I or any of my users don't want? WHAT'S WITH THAT!?!

And besides filling up drive space, accepting SPAM is bandwidth consuming. Every SPAM delivery takes up "space" on the DSL line connecting my server to the internet. increased spam means increase bandwidth for it and less bandwidth for the people I WANT to connect to my server to send me email or browse my web pages and so forth.

So here's where I'll post tips and tricks to help block spam and show the increase of how much I get now that we have a mechanism on the server to track SPAM whether it's blocked or accepted.

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