Here's a thought for you all:

We hate spam, right? not in the least because it waists immense amounts of bandwith yearly, strains our mailservers and plain and simple: irritates the heck out of us.

So what do all spams have in common? they try to 'sell' us something, more specific: they try to sell us something 'online'.

In order for them to get the message trough they need SOME way of relaying the 'selling party' website to unsuspecting potentital customers, so that people can order the 'goods' (whatever the product is) and leave their credit card details etc etc etc...

So here's my thought: suppose SF was able to figure out the 'selling party's website url automatically, and would send a really nice email to the ip found under the DNS MX record saying something about how much we like their selling strategy over the spammers highway and that we like to thank them for waisting millions of peoples mailbox spaces and all that.

I would also suggest for all of the SFDB members to do the same, for EVERY spam mail received by any one of us....... since we ofcourse all would like the opportunity to thank the spam-instigating company for sponsoring the nice lads and gals that do all their creativeness with regard to spams and how to bypass spamfilters. I mean: where would we be without that?

i've got a strong feeling this will not go down lightly with the selling company, since it will receive the (number of SFDB members) x (number of sent spams) of 'thank you notes' in their mailbox.

If we would all allow this extra traffic (during certain hours), then the company in question would really get a true feeling of the awesome gratitude and deep respect for their hard work in name of all spam-receivers worldwide.   

Ofcourse we would have to be very careful in not thanking the wrong party, but that speaks for itself.

I sometimes have a few minutes to spare, i start writing down stuff i'd maybe better not  oh well, never mind me.

I company called Blue Security tried to do a similar thing to this. They distributed a free piece of software that members installed on their PCs. Any persistent spammer that was not following the US anti-UCE laws and that was not unsubscribing users as per their request (even automatic unsubscribe from opt-out lists) would effectively receive a DOS attack from Blue Security using its members PCs with the free software installed.

Unfortunately the spammers hit back, and performed a very serious DoS on Blue Security and their ISP(s) - effecting a multitude of companies. I believe Blue Solutions admitted defeat and withdrew this service.

Google "blue security" for more info.

The only way this is going to get fixed is when Microsoft figures out how to stop their OS from being turned into a zombie and relaying all this crap we are getting now. 

What would be so hard for MS to come up with a small system level program that monitored port activity and reported anything suspicious in a pop-up windows asking if you wanted the OS to terminate that suspicious session or quarantine it.

I think MS should be ashamed of itself for not having fixed this. Its like a thief who keeps ripping off the same house over and over again because of poor locks the owner had installed and won't install better ones.

This plan won't work because of the possibility of a DDOS attack against individual or ISP's by, you guessed it, the zombiez

Ms has never taken its time to figure stuff out good, they have never released a product that was thoroughly tested and within reason bug-free, all one has to do is simply look at the amount of patches, hotfixes and service packs that are available for ANY OS...

This is economics at work, share-holders forcing programmers to release half-baked goods, making the end-users pay in more ways than one.

Unfortunately we seem to all love windows based OS'es, and so ms gets away with it, in a way we bring it upon ourselves by not going for alternatives 'en masse'.

Ms has the power to destabilize the world economy, no company should have this power, period. Ms has proven over and over again to not be capable of doing the right thing; create a solid, safe, stable platform that gives hackers/virus programmes no chance.

They CAN do it technically, but they in effect refuse, because ms is controlled by economics, which is pure and simple not a good recipe for creating something that is this important. On top of that, ms doesnt do jack-sh** in bringing virus programmes/hackers down, economics again?