[Mailman-Users] The economics of spam

[Rich Kulawiec]

On Sun, Jan 04, 2009 at 02:56:40PM -0600, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> You're argument boils down to "it's not wholly effective,  [snip]

Actually, my primary argument is that it has/would have zero effect.
There's no point in deploying something that the enemy completely
defeated years ago.

My secondary argument, which I didn't bother to articulate here,
but have gone into elsewhere, is that it may well make the spam
and related abuse problem *worse*.  (One of the most common mistakes
made by those proposing anti-spam measures is that they presume the
enemy will passively or actively accomodate those measures, despite
decades of evidence suggesting that at best, such measures will
encounter passive resistance, and at worse, they'll be actively
subverted to suit the enemy's purposes.)

---Rsk