I saw this for the first time a few years ago and thought it was really cool, then I went looking for it a while back and couldn't find it. Fortunately someone posted a new anti-spam method on slashdot today and some kind soul reposted it for me - basically it's a checklist that people keep busting out whenever someone comes up with a brand new method for spam fighting to point out how ineffective it (probably) will be.

Posting because it's sort of funny (if you're a nerd, anyway) and because I don't want to have to go looking for it again!

I saw this for the first time a few years ago and thought it was really cool, then I went looking for it a while back and couldn't find it. Fortunately someone posted a new anti-spam method on slashdot today and some kind soul reposted it for me - basically it's a checklist that people keep busting out whenever someone comes up with a brand new method for spam fighting to point out how ineffective it (probably) will be:

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, a******! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

I like

( ) Nice try, a******! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

I have an idea that is guaranteed to work. When I'm the ruler of the entire universe I'm going to ban email all together, people can go back to writing letters and you're going to need a licence to buy paper so everyone will be trackable.

I like

Specifically, your plan fails to account for... ( ) Outlook

There's nothing more likely to make my work day turn to s*** than having to use outlook, including a full-site outage. Right now it's deciding to pause for a good five seconds before letting me start to type after ALT-R'n a reply

Posting because it's sort of funny (if you're a nerd, anyway) and because I don't want to have to go looking for it again!

You obviously have a better understanding of the QGL search function, for me it brings up undisplayable page links or doesn't continue on to the second page of search results if it happens to return any results at all.

There should be a special black ops unit created with the purpose of seeking out and killing spammers and those that employ spammers.

i send spam at work

small fry stuff

20grand worth of emails to people who play golf

20grand worth of emails to people who play golf

Are they all opt-in?

golfcourses take down their details, if they supply an email address, it gets used

im constantly amazed at the number of people who reply to the spam, saying "take me off your mailing list"

i ignore those

if they bother to click on the unsubscribe link, i remove their address from the database

You obviously have a better understanding of the QGL search function, for me it brings up undisplayable page links or doesn't continue on to the second page of search results if it happens to return any results at all.

I typed in 'spam checklist' and it found this thread, which may be all trog is thinking

Yeh I just type words I'm looking for and then I get a list of things with those words in them