A few countries have outlawed spam while others debate such laws. Such laws will have limited effect since most spam comes from third-world countries that will never prosecute spammers; they simply have bigger problems. The solution is technology to stop as much spam as possible, wherever possible. In our estimation, most (shady) businesses find that spam barely works; the response rate is below .01%. If everyone blocked 95% of the spam, then the cost of sending spam would increase by a factor of 20. Even the shadiest business would no longer find it cost effective and would therefore stop sending it. (Let's hope so.)

In the meantime, if most of the "open relays" in the modern countries are reconfigured by their owners to be "closed relays", it will become much easier to block the remaining spam.

In our efforts to stop spam, we regularly inform legitimate ISPs and hosting companies that their systems are being used for spam. Most will shut down the websites used by spammers. Unfortunately, most spam websites run on computers outside the US/Canada.

We have also contacted our regional US Trade representative and explained how some anti-spam services are now blocking entire countries. We were surprised and pleased that our representative forwarded our message to his counterparts in the countries being blocked. Several foreign representatives in turn contacted us and explained that they understood the damage spam was causing, understood that having their country blocked was not desirable and that they would ask their governments to take steps to stop spammers. We encourage you to also take an active political role.