Incessant Expressions

I just read the following article about reporting spammers to their web hosts in order to deter their activities and how it’s more effective than anything else (via TechDirt). Since this is something I do every day, I have to strongly disagree with these people. Reporting spamvertising does stop it from occurring…from that particular web host, it doesn’t stop it in general. We gets tons of reports everyday about spamvertised sites and we take them down. I follow up on these sometimes and notice that the spammers just take their sites elsewhere and continue on, the cycle continues and nothing has changed. This is how these people make money and you’re not going to stop them from spamvertising (advertising a site solely through spam tactics) ever. While reporting is a good tactic, it’s not at all effective.

Our abuse email address at work receives spam, just like any other address, and many times it’s the same one over and over again from different addresses. Every few weeks, the URLs in the emails change but the email is still the same and their aim is the same. If people truly think that reporting spamvertising is really going to stop it, they need to stop reporting it altogether and find something more worthwhile to do such as develop filters that are capable enough of recognizing and filtering these emails out before they even reach a user. No matter what moves we make on the administrative side, spammers are always three steps ahead and their tools are so automated that there is very little they really have to do in order to continue making money.

Tags: No Comments