I’m not linking to it, because that would be tantamount to signing it, but Adam Kalsey has posted a manifesto regarding blog-comment spam at http://kalsey.com/2003/11/comment_spam_manifesto/. He seems to overestimate the power of bloggers, or maybe I’m overestimating the power of postmasters and large corporations. I believe ISPs are doing as much as they’re going to do to control ill-behaved clients, and that there will continue to be more open relays and proxies created (in some cases using worms) than can be shut down by any group of right-thinking geeks.
There’s also the issue that there are some relatively clever people on the dark side, helping propagate spam. I’d love to be wrong on this, but Mr Kalsey’s bluster just looks like an invitation to be taken out of the game, as happened to relays.osirusoft.com, which used to provide extremely valuable spam-fighting information, and has now been DoS-attacked off the net. Best of luck to us all.
And lest anybody think I know nothing of what I’m talking about, fighting spam takes up a substantial portion of my work day. I know the patterns of delivery; I’ve just recently gained an appreciation for the vast number of outfits benefiting from it; and I know better than most just exactly how hard it is to stop a determined spammer, even with the legal resources of a large corporation and some fairly smart people on my side. Fortunately, a surprisingly small percentage of spammers are truly determined. Unfortunately, that percentage will inevitably rise as blocking tools get more sophisticated.