Greetings!

I have fought especially "Canadian Pharmacy", who spams me up to 40 times per day  and other Drug pushers,  as well as loan sites for quite some time now. The problem is, that the spam and the web sites are global! We cannot really restrict global spam and web sites for they are not in our  jurisdiction.

But global spam can be blocked very easily, by simply giving the email recipient a choice where he does want mail and where not from! That could be easily done by a web interface to a program on the email server site, that checks the header info of the mail and then finds the IP Network range. This would be a small database that has all the network ranges and associated country codes. If I for example expect legitimate email from Canada, the US and another country in Europe, then I would enter this into the web interface of the email server. In that case the email server would dump any email, that comes from networks in countries I don't want or expect email from, while mail from the countries I have selected will end up in my mailbox. Naturally, this web interface wood allow me to select an override for a network range or IP Address I wanted in a country I usually would not accept email from.

This is not a big program, but this concept would be only effective if the law makes it mandatory for all email servers in the US and perhaps Canada.  Once that would happen, the spammers would face hard times, for most people, who dislike spam would limit their email reception to be within their jurisdiction.  After a while, the spammer would have to realize, that they lost the control they tried to establish! This way spam could only come out of the selected jurisdictions!  Once spam is only possible within the local jurisdiction, than laws and technologies can deal with it! Meaning within the local jurisdiction it can be made more and more difficult, risky and expensive to spread spam!  

I know, that some of you will argue, there a spam filters. Well a lot of people don't use them, but they are not a 100% and everybody uses a different Spam filter or ways to block unwanted email. Therefore you can never be sure, if legitimate email reaches the attention of the recipient! Now if an email is kind of important, due to spam, you have no other choice as to phone the recipients up and ask them if they got it!

Sure one can also change the email address, if the spam gets to heavy, I have done this in the past. I have even emailed everyone my new email address before I did that,  only to find out later, when someone called and told me, that their mail bounced back. So I told them, that I did send  them my new email address, only to find out, that they never noticed and perhaps deleted it, for it was mistaken for spam!

Now the main reason for this is global spam and it really is intruding peoples privacy and private lifes. It's time the lawmakers do something about it and give people the choice to  reject global spam!

Please let me know, what you thionk about all this! Cheers

Fred