How can we stop the madness? TQMCube’s David Hart, who currently runs a DNS blackhole list as an atonement of sorts for formerly serving as a consultant for a spammer, thinks that ISPs should simply block all unauthorized traffic on port 25, which computers use to send email. He believes that any port 25 traffic not destined for an ISP’s own mail server and accompanied with an authorized user name and password should be rejected.

Brian Livingston thinks the U.S. deserves a lot of the blame for having a weak spam law. The Can-Spam Act actually makes sending spam legal as long as the sender includes a street address and links to an unsubscribe process. While making spam illegal in the U.S. won’t wipe out the problem, “trying to stop shadowy, profitable activities is almost impossible if they aren’t illegal,” Livingston notes. “Only the existence of a Virginia law with real teeth tripped up Jeremy Jaymes [a notorious spammer]. A strong U.S. law could go a long way towards catching even more spammers.”

Meanwhile, some security vendors have released anti-botnet products, such as Trend Micro’s InterCloud Security Service for large network providers. The service identifies zombies on a network and can help stop them in real time. Trend Micro also says it has an anti-spam product that can detect and filter image spam.

Email clients are often loaded down with too many features. Rather than one big groupware package such as Outlook or Evolution, sometimes a simple email client is all you need. We look at three Linux email-only clients and see how they fare against today's standards. The email clients we'll look at are Balsa, KMail, and Sylpheed.

Balsa
Ten years ago when it was still in beta, this application was solid, reliable, and user-friendly. It didn't have extensions, spell check, or junk mail. Balsa simply read, replied to, deleted and saved your email.

Balsa was the first GUI tool that I used in Linux whose sole purpose was to process email. It wasn't part of the quickly outmoded Mozilla; it integrated with my desktop in both look and feel, which was important. I'll always remember how different Mozilla looked when it fired up; at the time, I was trying desperately to make my Linux desktop not look like the old-school Unix-like desktop, and Balsa gave me that ability. (Article in full and in original, available from ZD Net)