Liudvikas Bukys

Plaid up in arms as Commons spam filter bans Welsh.
“Parliamentarians from the Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru, are complaining that bilingual English-and-Welsh emails are been blocked as containing “inappropriate content”, the BBC reports. … Evidence points to Clearswift’s (formerly Content Technologies) MAILSweeper as the package to blame for the debacle. ”
[The Register]

BBC:
E-mail vetting blocks MPs’ sex debate:

A new e-mail vetting system at the House of Commons is stifling debate among MPs over serious parliamentary business such as the Sexual Offences Bill, it is claimed.

The system was introduced last month after MPs complained about getting inundated with pornographic and rude e-mails.
official

More than 900 e-mails were blocked in its first week, and the new system is now proving too restrictive and causing “chaos”, according to one MP.

Brad Templeton on
E-Stamps:

I first started thinking about this at the very start of the spam problem, (around 1995) as an interesting technical solution that hits at one of the root causes of spam. I leave it up here since it was my first idea in the quest for a solution to spam. I may have been the first to think of it, but many have also come up with the same idea independently, based on the thought that if you can make even a small negative cost to spam, the problem would go away.

However, I have since abandoned now even
oppose the idea for a variety of reasons. These include the total failure of the several serious attempts to build an online money micropayment system or other such infrastructure, and the almost impossible problems raised by any solution that needs new software at both sender and recipient. There are also free speech concerns. As such, it remains an academic exercise.

I just came across the following in a David Friedman essay,
Mail Me the Money!, published August 2002:

My email contains much of interest. It also contains READY FOR A SMOOTH WAY OUT OF DEBT?, A Personal Invitation from make_real_money@BIGFOOT.COM, You’ve Been Selected….. from friend@localhost.net, and a variety of similar messages, of which my favorite offers “the answer to all your questions.” The internet has brought many things of value, but for most of us unsolicited commercial email, better known as spam, is not one of them.
…
There is a simple solution to this problem — so simple that I am surprised nobody has yet implemented it. The solution is to put a price on your mailbox. Give your email program a list of the people you wish to receive mail from. Any mail from someone not on the list is returned, with a note explaining that you charge five cents to read mail from strangers. Five cents is a trivial cost to anyone with something to say that you are likely to want to read — but five cents times ten million recipients is quite a substantial cost to someone sending out bulk email on the chance that one recipient in ten thousand may respond.

It’s a pretty good idea.
I must point out back in November 1992, when the “com-priv” mailing
list was where the action was, I made essentially the same proposal,
to quote:

A better “free market” social convention is that senders negotiate
delivery prices with recipients. People who want junk mail from some
source arrange for free delivery, people who don’t want junk mail
demand that senders pay them big bucks for the privilege of putting
something in their mailbox, tricksters try to make money by looking
like attractive targets for junk mail, the mailing list industry is
reborn as high-quality mailing lists become much more important for
reaching your target audience and avoiding the tricksters, an
electronic stamp industry is created for the purpose of organizing
third-party mailing lists that recipients like being on, and a
wonderful equilibrium settles over the network as the financial
incentives are there for people to receive only what they are
interested in.
Unfortunately, this requires a lot of work on the protocol side
(electronic money transfers, stamp authentication), but if the
protocols were there, I think that the social aspects are attractive
enough that people would go through the cataclysm willingly.

At the time, there were a few friendly remarks,from Steve Crocker
and Ken Laws, with Christopher Locke expressing a little interest,
but the itch wasn’t strong enough, nobody implemented or adopted,
so here we are ten years later with a spam crisis — one so severe
that (I predict) this will be the year in which solutions will be
adopted almost universally — and that solution will in most cases
be automatic text classification and machine learning tools applied
as spam filters.

But there may be room still for innovation in money flows
as well, for two reasons: (1) The population of people whose base expectation is “don’t send me email” may become significant —
and that population may have no resistance to adopting new protocols
for “pay me to read this”. (2) This population will balloon because
of the same issues arising on metered portable devices such as cell
phones.

Yes, “bonded senders” are a small incremental step along this path.

SpamArchive.org Launched [Slashdot]

WSJ:

For Bulk E-Mailer, Pestering Millions Offers Path to Profit
“In the first week of the Triumvirate Technologies campaign, 81 orders came through from 3.5 million messages, a 0.0023% response rate. Still, that generated $1,555 in commissions, and Ms. Betterly was pleased. At that rate, she expected to clear about $25,000 in the end.”

[via Slashdot: The Economics of Spam]

See also

NPR Morning Edition interview with Laura Betterley

When the Spam Hits the Blogs:
Web spammers populate referral logs.
“They’re trying to jump-start a meme.”

The Story:
(Don’t try this at home!)
A spammer’s victim hacks the spammer and reveals more than you want to know about the spammer and her techniques.

Spammers crack through Windows. (Creating popups via the Windows Messenger service) ZDNet Oct 18 2002 6:51AM ET [Moreover – Computer security news]

Paul Graham:
A Plan for Spam:
“I think we will be able to solve the problem with fairly simple algorithms. In fact, I’ve found that you can filter present-day spam acceptably well using nothing more than a Bayesian combination of the spam probabilities of individual words. Using a slightly tweaked (as described below) Bayesian filter, we now miss only 5 per 1000 spams, with 0 false positives.”