What's causing spam? Reasons for spam: - people want traffic on their sites (because they hope to make more business) - or they want to distribute malware.
Whom to spam: - spammers try to find contact identifiers to send messages to. They do this by: - random combinations of words - harvesting the internet Now they know email addresses or random addresses to send messages to people. Why can they do this? Because sending email to everyone is possible easily. Some more questions are: Why aren't computers sending spam shutdown earlier? I'm no expert here. Maybe it easy to hack pc's maybe some admins don't care - maybe its just the delay it takes from seeing the first spam till shutting down. So that email is open to everyone - the fact that everybody can send stuff to anybody else and that your contact id (user@host) can be guessed are reasons that spam exist. Did you note something? I didn't even write once about SMPT. Because all those facts are not related to SMPT. Google tried "google waves" and thought it could replace emails. Probably they were wrong. Emails just work very well .. So if I were you I'd try getting either a good spam filter or users to - never publish their address - us a random char email address such as oun234eq4qj423e@host Then spam will be reduced .. :) (Unless spammers catch up) Given what I wrote rethink about why it should be the SMPT protocol causing spammers to appear. I'm not an expert on this area. So if any statement looks too wrong correct me, please. Marc Weber
