Spam is a million-cuts offense. Nobody thinks it's big, because nobody gets killed or robbed. If someone steals $50,000 we all agree he should go to jail. Spam isn't a victim-less crime, it costs something. Time, effort and resources. It's hard to measure exactly, but let's say for arguments sake that a spam e-mail costs 1% of one cent. I know the spam that flooded the M&F forum today cost a lot more than that, because it took about an hour of my time to clean everything out. But let's assume an average.
Your typical spammer sends several million spam mails every day. That's a couple hundred $ in damage - PER DAY. He's doing the $50k heist twice a year. And that's your typical spammer, large operations are tens of times that size.
And Tim, if you think I'm wrong or over-zealous, how about I disable all the anti-spam stuff that this forum runs just for one week and let you clean things up? Just so you know, they have prevented 143,921 spam bot sign-ups since we installed them. That's not world-wide, that is THIS FORUM ONLY. The typical spam bot makes 3-5 postings before he moves on (they know more will trigger deeper spam defenses), so that's about half a million postings prevented by people who agree with me and sat down to write anti-spam software. Which costs time and money.
So yes, everyone who supports spam in even the slightest way is aiding and abetting a criminal.
Why do I count hotmail on that list? Because while other services have their share of spam accounts registered, hotmail stands in a league of its own. They have never, ever, given a !@#$, even before MS bought them. They were listed on rfc-ignorant.org for most of their existence and have consistently ignored messages to both postmaster@hotmail.com and abuse@hotmail.com - two addresses that the "laws of the Internet" REQUIRE you to have for all your domains. Their backend-behaviour is outright hostile, they apparently save costs by pushing the entire burden of e-mail on other servers as far as technically possible with bull!@#$ bounces and delays, aggressive delivery and reluctant reception. They do to e-mail what AOL used to do to Usenet, except that Usenet had at least some organisation and could fight back (and AOL did get awfully close to a UDP).
Quite honestly, I don't think anyone who isn't at the front of this war that we system administrators, server software authors and security professionals fight for you users every day, every year, for over a decade now with no end in sight, should even speak up. There was a proposal a year or two ago that all the server admins of the world should band together and turn of any and all anti-spam tools for just one day. The idea was that if all the law-makers and regular people would actually GET the massive flood of spam that floods the Internet every day, they would finally understand that there really is a problem. The main counter-argument was that doing so would destroy e-mail once and for all.
Don't believe me? Think I'm exaggerting? Numbers: The lemuria.org mailserver has filtered out almost 15,000 spam messages during the past month. That's 500 spam messages every day. Tell me, how long would you bother with e-mail if your inbox would be flooded with a few hundred spam messages EVERY DAY?
If you don't think spam is a massive, out-of-control problem, that's because you live behind the walls that people like me hold for you. It's ignorant to an unbelievable degree. It's like saying that since we're all pretty healthy, all those doctors and hospitals aren't necessary anymore. You are healthy BECAUSE they exist and make it so. And the only reason you think spam is not an Internet-threatening problem is because thousands of people work tirelessly every day writing and maintaining anti-spam software, updating blacklists, cleaning up the mess, figuring out new ways to stop new kinds of spam and keeping the flood at bay.
end rant.
