Simon

Cumbria

IT

To Anonymous from Scotland, what you are getting is "pump and dump" spam (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump). It's harmless to you as it contains no malicious code - but it is trying to persuade you to buy shares and inflate the price so that the perpetrator can sell their holdings (bought cheap) at a profit.

The things is that if ISPs actually got their act together they could slash spam overnight. Sure it'll cost them a bit in engineering, but I recon it would cost them less than they are paying now to try and deal with the results of doing nothing.

The first thing they need to do is filter all outgoing smtp traffic from their customers (and provide an opt-in facility for legitimate senders). This would simply block the spam at the ISPs network. This would not affect the 90+% of users who send their mail via their ISPs servers. The only way left for the spammers would be to route the outbound traffic via the ISPs servers where it will be a lot easier to detect and kill.

Like I say, not a lot of work, and some ISPs do it already. It will only stop when all ISPs do it.