Spamming the main DNS servers I hear is a federal offense, which would not be one which would go overlooked. Also it would not be something that even Pharmaster would want to do.

One point to consider is the primary one of net netrality. If people overstep the mark where the internet gets policed by either corporate entities saying they are protecting the internet or government organizations imposing limits, there will be such situations.

I was one, presumably of many, who decided to end my BF membership after getting a growing volume of anti-BF emails from anonymous sender/s. Like you, I thought the BF response to spam was of merit. Pity it failed. Maybe someone else will find a better implementation one day, but even then I will be slow to enroll. I’ll need to see a handful of positive endorsements from users who’ve run it for a good while without incident.

Okay - nothing more than a mention of mortgage on this page but I’m glad I found you anyway.

My suspicion is that, in practice, this risk is mitigated by the fact that spam generally falls into categories: Viagra, “body part enhancement”, singles, porn, etc. Thus, aggregating different spam senders (advertisers) by category helps reduce this problem: some spamvertisers give up, but others enter the field. By extension, your logic would apply in two sets of circumstances. First, an entire category becomes unprofitable for spam: diversion of mortgage offers gets sufficiently good that it’s not worth anyone’s time to spamvertise, bar.com stops paying ISP, and the opportunity opens again. (This might be worse if spammers try test messages on old, abandoned subjects to see if they’ll work.) Second, a new category becomes profitable: people suddenly begin responding to spam offering monkey lawnmowers (hat tip to Sunday’s episode of The Simpsons), forcing ISPs to detect this new spam pattern, find a credible monkey lawnmower vendor, and begin redirection. This is absolutely a problem, but at least it’s one of a smaller magnitude.

Does this strike you as right? Thanks!

That is, say isp.com sees a flood of spam to its users advertizing mortgage.foo.com and, as suggested, redirects traffic to mortgage.bar.com, which is known not to use spammers and pays for this privileged position. Subsequently, mortgage.foo.com loses the return it used to get from using spammers and stops hiring them. Over time, mortgage spamming drops to a negligible level. This is your contention, if I read you correctly.

Now that the level of spam has dropped, mortgage.bar.com isn’t really getting any business forwarded its way, so it’s not efficient to pay for this (no longer so) privileged position. Once nobody’s paying for that position, what’s to stop mortgage.foo.com from starting to hire spammers again? And around the cycle we go.