Saag's chicken parmesan sausage with peppers, onions, deli mustard and sauerkraut.

Saag's chicken parmesan sausage with peppers, onions, deli mustard and sauerkraut.

So Gov. Davis signed California’s anti-spam bill yesterday. The bold experiment to fight the barrage of electronic junk mail enables California residents, the state attorney general and Internet providers to seek civil damages against spammers amounting to $1,000 per e-mail and $1 million per incident. Quick guess: Little or no effect. Too many spammers originate [...]

So Gov. Davis signed California’s anti-spam bill yesterday.

The bold experiment to fight the barrage of electronic junk mail enables California residents, the state attorney general and Internet providers to seek civil damages against spammers amounting to $1,000 per e-mail and $1 million per incident.

Quick guess: Little or no effect. Too many spammers originate out-of-state or overseas, and spam isn’t even about selling products anymore; it’s about verifying valid email addresses to sell to other would-be spammers. A mega-pyramid scheme if you will. The only thing that will really stop spam is an overhaul of SMTP, maybe even replacing it entirely, to eliminate falsified headers.

In the meantime I use SpamPal with the Bayesian filter plugin, which catches some large percentage (haven’t graphed it) of my spam with very rare false positives or negatives.