Allan Shriver

Oxford

Communications

Where is the sanity in this? Are we really to believe that the IT industry which has come up with Windows, MacOS, UNIX, Linux, ERM, CRM, ad nauseum, is too DIM to work out how to stop spam?

It is usually perfectly obvious, to anyone with half a brain, that an email is a spam (with or without a virus) by looking at the title and/or first line of the message (visible if message preview is 'on' - in Outlook anyway). Annual ISP charges are not insignificant to home users, so why don't they have people 'on watch' 24/7 for inbound messages which are obvious spam? Lazy? Profit-greedy? Don't-give-a-damn attitude? If they stop one inbound spam there, they can stop it from turning into 100,000+ outbound spams (since many spams [that i get, anyway]) seem to pick up email addresses from my ISP!!! Any ISPs out there with the balls to speak up want to answer that?

Or if that's too 'human labour intensive' (ie costly) then why not develop some s/w that will spot emails with *.exe attachment and at least 'flag' them as such when they are sent to the email account holder? Then this feature (to allow/disallow attachments with executables) should be able to be activated/de-activitate on-line by the email account holder.

Secondly, Micro$oft is keen to give away s/w like IE for browsing, so why don't they give away anti-V s/w, too? They'd do their public reputation a WHOLE lot of good if they did. Afterall, it's mostly their hole-ridden s/w that allows spam to get through!

How about it, M$, hmmm???

...or is security on PCs going to get so bad that we have to go back to using faxes and pen and paper, while the Internet goes the way of the Dodo???