Why does this group have so much spam?

[MRAB]

Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:48:19 +0200, David wrote:
> 
>> Il Tue, 1 Sep 2009 11:50:14 +0200, Andre Engels ha scritto:
>>
>>
>>> What about mailing lists? There exist well-functioning mailing lists
>>> with thousands of subscribers. Being a posting member of those will
>>> significantly increase your internet bill under your proposal.
>> It's an implementation issue, it doesn't touch the sense of proposal.
>> One possibility is register the mail list to official registers and mail
>> from a subscriber to other subscribers will be excluded from taxation or
>> will have a lower tax rate.
>> An excessive mailing from a single or few subscribers can be easily
>> detected, traced, filtered and, if the case, prosecuted.
> 
> This can be done already, without the need for an email tax. ISPs could 
> easily detect spammers, if they cared to.
> 
> There are a few things that can already be done to cut the spam problem 
> to manageable size:
> 
> (1) Why aren't ISPs blocking port 25 for home users by default? My home 
> ISP does, I can only send email through their mail server unless I ask 
> them nicely, in which case I'd be responsible for any spam that leaves my 
> home network. If I send spam, I'll be breaking my terms of service.
> 
> (2) Why aren't ISPs cutting off detected spam bots? Owners of zombied PCs 
> are menaces to society. ISPs are in the best position to detect PCs which 
> are spamming, and alert the owner. If no action is taken in a week, warn 
> the owner that they're in breach of their terms of service, and if the 
> behaviour persists, cut the owner off until they clean up their PC. 
> Repeat offenders should be banned.
> 
The preferred option these days is to slow down net access of the
offenders, not cut them off completely. I'm not sure how many ISPs
actually do that yet.