Is There Any Way to Really Fight Spam?

Hold a Sit-In!

Spam wastes an incredible amount of resources, and nobody likes it, except the spammers themselves. After all, they're making money. The endless cycle of putting up filters and such is the wrong approach; they just keep finding ways of getting past them. After all, you want to get your email, right?

What we need to do is attack the demand for spam. We can hold a "sit-in" at the sponsors' web sites! Just as with a traditional sit-in, we choose a place (ie the spam sponsor's web site), set a time when everybody should go there, and then at the appointed time, we all "go", ie repeatedly request the page.

Just as a million interested citizens inadvertently brought down the U.S. Affordable Care Act web site, we can bring a spammer client web site to a standstill, if enough of us want to, without doing the site itself any damage, nor breaking any law. Each participant in the sit-in is doing just what the spammer client wants us to do: go to the site.

The Sit-In app (currently available only at the SlideME android market) from earth42, facilitates each part of this process.