Cops cuff alleged email hackers in GLOBAL bust

Yeah, but the spammers were there first

Not sure if these particular sociopathic scumbags started their careers as spammers, but I think that most of them start there. I even lost an old friend that way. It isn't exactly the moral equivalent of a gateway drug, but similar. Some people actually are conned into becoming spammers or accomplices of spammers...

Ergo, I'll repeat that I think we should go more aggressively after the business models of the spammers. Reactive filtering is obviously something the spammers can live with, but if we cut off their money, most of them would crawl under less visible rocks.

I think the large email providers should provide some interactive crowd-based tools so that wannabe spam fighters could at least help with the targeting against the spammers' infrastructure. In addition, we should pursue ALL of the spammers' accomplices and try to protect ALL of the spammers' victims, mostly from their own gullibility and stupidity. Yeah, the suckers lose the money to the spammers, but the rest of us lose even more. The spammers are destroying the value of email for everyone and utterly wasting vast amounts of OTHER people's valuable time and attention. Worth mentioning that many of the victims are also innocent corporations whose valuable reputations are exploited by spammers in their desperate search for credibility.