At 9:42 PM -0500 4/17/04, Doug White wrote:
Spamming is pervasive mainly due to the inattention or failure to enforce acceptable use policies by the service provider.
It's pervasive because its profitable. It's been profitable because even a few weeks of a high-speed circuit can generate millions of messages which don't need much of a response rate to generate revenue. The problem now is that a growing percentage of spam is originating from distributed farms of broadband connected users (Commtouch says 80% in one article, but I'm not yet convinced its that high - <http://www.clickz.com/stats/big_picture/applications/article.php/3337751>) This would suggest that spam is pervasive largely because of the large number of insecure systems available for origination (via port 25 :-), not because of providers failing to close barn doors after the fact... /John