Spammer Is As Spammer Does

Laura has an outstanding post on her blog about upcoming changes to reputation systems.¹ If you haven’t looked at it, you should.

Part of one of the comments,² though, has caused a bit of a commotion:

While I’m with you in spirit, I’m not optimistic that “blocking ESPs” will have much of a lasting impact. It’s the same old arms race. If a large ISP blocks an entire ESP, the ESP will respond by obtaining new IP space in such a way that it can’t be identified as a group. Cloud computing is only going to make this easier. If they block based on something in the headers or body, the ESPs will remove those those distinguishing marks.

Here’s the bit that should concern us: if ESPs actually tried what the commenter suggests, they would become spammers.

How do I know this? Well, there are several reasons.

First, they would act like spammers. Laura also has a wonderful series of posts with the prefix “TWSD”³ for “That’s What Spammers Do.” One thing spammers do is hide behind shell corporations and false-front businesses. Amazingly, that’s one of the things that she has keyed upon:⁴

Some of the more dedicated, but just this side of legal, spammers set up 3 or 4 different front companies: one to sell advertising, one or more to actually send mail, one to get connectivity and one as a backup for when the first three fail. Because they use rotating domain names and IP addresses all hidden behind fake names or “privacy protection services”, the actual spammer can be impossible to track without court documents.

If those of us who work for ESPs start acting like spammers do, then don’t we become what we claim to hate?

A few years ago, that great philosopher Forrest Gump said, “Stupid is as stupid does.” The same applies here. Spammers are people who do what spammers do, whether that’s sending mail people never asked for, setting up shell companies to get IPs, or sending mail “from the cloud” to avoid IP-based blocking.

Spammers are as spammers do.