Why Public Email Needs a Police Force 133
jfruhlinger writes "Those of us who had email addresses in the early days of the Internet age remember sending notes to webmaster email addresses to report malicious email behavior — and actually getting a response back. But today, a huge majority of mail comes from public services like Gmail or Yahoo mail, and getting anyone at those companies to take responsibility for abusive users is nearly impossible. 'If they could agree on a third-party service that could be the receptacle on a 24/7 basis for rapid account suspension, the 419 Fraud problem might dwindle down to a trickle quickly. It would take trust among the email providers to do this, but it would also alleviate big problems that law enforcement officials are usually unable to handle. Call them the email cops.'"
no it dont (Score:4, Insightful)
enough with the voluntary fascism.
No (Score:0, Insightful)
No it doesn't. That is why you have an ignore feature. Grow up and stop trying to cry to mommy and daddy when you feel the slightest bit offended.
Re:Cyber police? (Score:2, Insightful)
Unless the person who is looking for help is friends with the police, then something will happen even if the accused didn't even come close to doing anything wrong.
If he gets his way, yes. (Score:5, Insightful)
He's focusing on 419 scams. He wants an instant (or almost instant) way to shut down the accounts that the 419 scammers use.
Which means either an automated system (yeah, how'd you like your account killed because of something you posted on /. that someone took offense to)
or
A staff monitoring the abuse@ and postmaster@ accounts for the various email systems around the clock, every single day.
And what would this accomplish?
It would save the gullible people from themselves. Maybe. As long as the scammers didn't target their emails with enough different reply_to addresses to bypass this.
I'm not getting a very good feeling for this guy's technical credentials.