In-game mail spam management tools need a (major) rework

[Omnis_Decline]

At present, when you want to send a spam mail, such as, for example, creating a new character and firing off your recruitment link to the couple of hundred or so players in local in one of the starting areas of the game, there is nothing to prevent you from spamming other players with that message. It’s only when you send a second mass message from the same character that the game tries to charge you ISK to do so.

This puts a nearly-imperceptible barrier in the way of dedicated spammers, who can easily create numerous free alts, and spam multiple locations rapidly, and repeat the process rapidly across several alts by deleting and creating new characters on those accounts in a loop. On the other side, the players receiving those spam mails are only able to reply ONCE to any such spam message, then have to disregard future mails of similar nature or pay ISK to ttry and warn others of the abusive nature of these mails.

This means that spammers are easily able to keep spamming, and legitimate players can’t effectively counteract their behaviour. Exactly the opposite of how an adequate system should affect the playerbase. I have 2 separate suggestions for how to fix this problem. I won’t say both should be implemented, but at least one OR the other would make sense.

1. “Reply to all” messages should NOT incur a penalty for “spam” because they are a reply to an existing email group, not one created by the person sending the mail, unless additional users beyond the original group are added to the message’s recipient list.
2. No exceptions made for your first time sending a mass message to a group. Exceptions should be curated user lists which have been opted into, and corp and alliance mails being sent in accordance with the corp or alliance permissions for such messaging.

Seems pretty simple to me, to the point that I’m confused the system works how it does instead of having at least one of these precautions in place already.

[Maldiro_Selkurk]

There are a multitude of channels available for spamming in EVE and any real attempt at stopping spam would require large scale player and moderator oversight. This is what keeps the Rookie Help and Help channels free of spam. Spammers will find a way to get around moderation attempts based on some set of rules that is why so much space garbage has an attached spam message. That is why what seems ‘pretty simple’ to you to stop, really isn’t.

[Omnis_Decline]

I never said it’s “pretty simple” to stop spam entirely. I said it’s “pretty simple” to implement a MUCH better system than we have currently, with very few changes needed from the current system to improve it.