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

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 natural health author and technology pioneer with a mission to teach personal and planetary health to the public He has authored more than 1,500 articles and dozens of reports, guides and interviews on natural health topics, impacting the lives of millions of readers around the world who are experiencing phenomenal health benefits from reading his articles. Adams is a trusted, independent journalist who receives no money or promotional fees whatsoever to write about other companies' products. In 2007, Adams launched EcoLEDs, a maker of energy efficient LED lights that greatly reduce CO2 emissions. He also founded an environmentally-friendly online retailer called BetterLifeGoods.com that uses retail profits to help support consumer advocacy programs. He's also the founder and CEO of a well known email mail merge software developer whose software, 'Email Marketing Director,' currently runs the NaturalNews email subscriptions. Adams also serves as the executive director of the Consumer Wellness Center, a non-profit consumer protection group, and regularly pursues cycling, nature photography, Capoeira and Pilates. 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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