New international anti-spam council pledges to fight spam around the world

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As much as I applaud the motivation and intention of this group, I think it's just one more fight that's destined to lose the battle against spammers. That's because spammers have such an easy time sending millions and millions of e-mails (and it makes financial sense for them to do so). If you want to stop spammers, you have to change the economics of spamming, which is something I've been proposing and standing behind for quite some time now. To effectively stop spammers, you either have to make spamming less profitable on the sales side, or more expensive on the sending side.

The only way to reduce the sales revenues from spam is to get end users to stop purchasing products promoted by spammers. My own effort, called "Spam. Don't Buy It." has been attempting to do this, but chances are some people are always going to purchase from spam simply because they don't know any better, or they really want those products.

So the answer is to make sending e-mail more expensive for spammers, and the only real way to do that is to adopt something like the Microsoft puzzle solution, which adds a small amount of friction to the sending of e-mails -- just enough to frustrate spammers, but not enough interfere with the sending of e-mail by everyday users.

It is this puzzle solution which offers a real, permanent solution to halting spam, not another international anti-spam police force or enforcement council that will spend even more time hunting down and trying to block spam from individuals who will simply run to another country and do the same thing over again. The bottom line is that the spam problem is not a regulatory problem, nor a legislative problem. It is a problem of economics, and until you shift the economics and make spamming unprofitable, we will never see an end to spam, no matter how many people get involved, even if they have the right intentions.

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About the author: Mike Adams is a holistic nutritionist with a strong interest in personal health, the environment and the power of nature to help us all heal He has authored and published thousands of articles, interviews, consumers guides, and books on topics like health and the environment, reaching millions of readers with information that is saving lives and improving personal health around the world. Adams is an independent journalist with strong ethics who does not get paid to write articles about any product or company. In 2007, Adams launched EcoLEDs, a maker of super bright LED light bulbs that are 1000% more energy efficient than incandescent lights. He's also a veteran of the software technology industry, having founded a personalized mass email software product used to deliver email newsletters to subscribers. Adams is currently the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a 501(c)3 non-profit, and enjoys outdoor activities, nature photography, Pilates and adult gymnastics. Known on the 'net as 'the Health Ranger,' Adams shares his ethics, mission statements and personal health statistics at www.HealthRanger.org

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