End Spam

We the undersigned want an end to spam and mass e-mail attacks (phishing, viruses, worms etc)

The first commercial spam was in April 1994. We feel that too much time has passed since then for an effective solution to become widely available. Spam remains a growing problem and in 2005 accounts for about 90\% of all email. An estimated $40 billion is spent per year dealing with it. This is an unacceptable waste of time, money and resources.

As a result of spam, we are being plagued with inappropriate and malicious content, adult material being sent to children, offers for goods and services we do not want, phishing attacks for personal details, virus attacks and so on. This poses a risk to children, holds up legitimate mail, allows fraud and other criminal activity, and endangers computer security and integrity of personal data.

Even after this length of time solutions so far are patchy, variable in quality, result in additional costs for innocent people, often take time going through folders to separate good mail from spam, can result in good mail being misclassified or held up and can add to the problem of inappropriate mail through the misuse of challenge-response. It is also difficult for the average user to objectively compare the various systems presently on offer are there are few freely available impartial reports to compare them. All of this spam is extremely costly, time consuming, a waste of resources and detracts from the usefulness of e-mail.

Given the seriousness of these problems we feel a solution is long overdue and that standards bodies, internet service providers, anti-spam vendors, e-mail providers, e-mail software vendors and legislators are doing too little too late to make a robust and reliable solution to spam widely available to the Internet as a whole.

There have been a huge number of advances on the Internet since the first spam in 1994 including the development of search engines, browsers, e-commerce, web mail, auctions, real time audio and video, Internet phone calls, online banking, downloadable music and blogging. We believe that it is time that email caught up with the other advances in technology since 1994 and we are calling for resources to be diverted to combating spam more effectively, and where possible blocking the spam at source.

We believe that as a minimum and like browsers, search engines and most web mail, the Internet community should have free access to a basic server side spam filtering service that works - ideally open source. The money saved in bandwidth costs on the Internet would offset the costs of managing the new service. This doesnt preclude any company making a commercial service out of add-ons or additional services.

This petition is a call for action to the Internet community to make such a universal anti-spam service available and for legislators worldwide to enact legislation that can punish spammers effectively.

For more information, please view the spampetition home page http://www.siliconglen.com/spampetition