A Bold New Anti-SPAM Proposal. Will it work?

Great Debates
1

No one that I respect likes SPAM, but we keep getting it. I’m up to 60 pieces of junk mail per day, and I estimate it is doubling every 6 months.

Anti-SPAM laws have been passed in several U.S. states, and the Feds and others are talking about a multitude of different approaches:[ul][li]Forcing emailers to pay per post[]Requiring “ADV” in the header[]Requiring an opt-in list[]Requiring mailers to respect a national “do not call” list[]Requiring mailers to respect a national “opt-in” listetc., etc.[/ul][/li]Whenever a law is passed, no matter how well-intentioned it is, it always includes the unintended in its claws. For example, I email about 140 members of our neighborhood association whenever something happens that I think they should know about, which is about 8 times a year. No one has ever complained and many have written to thank me. If anyone asked to be removed, I would gladly do it, but we are too small to have a formal, web-based procedure in place for this function and we probably couldn’t afford to pay for a permit like the big boys if this were required.

So tho I dislike SPAM, I dislike legislation to solve this problem even more.

Here is my Bold New Anti-SPAM Proposal. Educate the public to absolutely not respond to SPAM ads.

Tell the public that responding is encouraging illegal behavior, probably will cost you money for goods not delivered, these are fly-by-night operators, you’ll be sorry, these are the bad guys yo momma warned you about, body part enlargers and mortgage loans are available elsewhere and cheaper, etc.

The only reason SPAMmers continue is they must be making money. Or they think they will. Either way, eventually they will go into some other line of work if they aren’t making enough moolah.

It is a maxim that it costs nothing to send emails. But that can’t be absolute unless you are borrowing (or stealing) someone else’s computer. It has to cost SOMETHING!

But how much? There was a Wall Street Journal article about an egregious SPAMmer, Howard Carmack, who was arrested recently. Although Earthlink was persuing him on SPAM flooding, he was charged with using false identities and forgery to set up illegal ISP accounts. Carmack earned 360 for sending out 10,000,000 emails for one client. So, he earned .000036 per email on the average. How much does it cost to send out 10 Mil emails? If the return had been $50 instead of 360, would it still have been profitable? Maybe, but not if he earned $0.

I’m sure someone will point out the impossibility of educating 100% of the population to not respond to SPAM. But can’t we try to reduce the response percentage to head off legislation and other bad stuff? The cure might be worse than the disease.

Hunh?

2

I think the best way to disseminate your idea would be to perform a series of bulk mailings…

3

Good idea, Mangetout, but I’m afraid people would delete the warning without reading it. Maybe if we gave it a different subject, like “server is down”…

4

You’re obviously way ahead of me, mahattan; I was going to suggest enticing people with something original such as ‘click here for hot babes with horses’.

Seriously though, Musicat, I think your final paragraph is the key; it is hard to motivate people to all do the same thing, even if they all intellectually acknowledge the benefit of it.
Take the DNFTT rule here, for example - we know we’re not supposed to respond to trolls and yet we can’t resist.

5

You mean like:

NEVER GET ANOTHER MESSAGE LIKE THIS ONE! Click here to fight spam…and send this to everyone you know!!!

I’d fall for it. :smiley:

6

Or “about our dinner date Friday”

or “haven’t seen you in a while”

or “re: job application”

7

You could gather the names and addresses of the most notorious spammers and go vigilante on them by signing them up for every worthless junk mail list around. Some folks did that to a scummy spammer in Michigan and his home was inundated with tons of junk mail.

Of course, he responded by threatening to sue the people who signed him up for all that worthless crap–basically for doing to him what he’s being doing to everyone else for years, albeit through a different medium.

8

The problem is, even if you manage to educate 99.9% of the population, the 0.1% remaining are going to be the ones who would have responded to the spam anyway so the education would have been worthless.

And our current track record with educating people about not doing stupid things is not too good either. Look at how many people still fall for pyramid schemes or Nigerean scams.

9

I’ve always said the problem isn’t the spammers (they’re a secondary effect), the problem is the people who buy from them, and it should be illegal. I think anyone who buys from a spammer should be fined and possibly imprisoned (short term). The only problem is it would only affect spammers sending UCE to americans subject to the law.

So, we just need to have an international law, and make examples of a few buyers. Stick them on the news… the guy who bought the penis lengthening pills. Cane him … 20 lashes.

10

You want to make stupidity a crime? How is buying off the internet in any way illegal? What if he ordered the lengthener, it go shipped to him in a discreet and expident fashion and he was wholly satisfied with the product? Is that still illegal?

Thats a BAD road your going down there.

11

You’re probably right. Look at WIN (Whip Inflation Now), Just Say No (to drugs), and Only YOU can prevent forest fires, just to name a few that had SOME impact, but not enough.

What we need to do is compute just how much the average SPAM message costs to send, then educate enough people that the return becomes so low that the cost exceeds the return. There must be SOME number, maybe not .1% of the public, but maybe .01%, that would be insufficient to support the SPAM habit. I wonder what that number would be?

And even tho the trend of SPAM quantity is up, for all we know, the saturation level may have been reached already, and it may soon approach an equilibrium. [sub][sup]Hey, I can dream, can’t I?[/sup][/sub]

12

Ahh, spam. A subject close to Dev’s heart. It’s been about ten years since I had my first one.

First, a bit of pedantry: Please note that SPAM™ is a potted meat product, whereas spam is unsolicited bulk mail.

You can’t stop spam by educating recipients not to buy. Why is that? Because the money in spamming is made by the people that send the spam, not the people who employ it. In other words, the people that make money off the spam aren’t the people pushing the product. It’s the people pushing the marketing method. Does that make any sense?

On a more fundamental level, spamming is best stopped by the ISPs themselves by blocking and shunning the parts of the net whence spam comes. Try www.spamhaus.org or www.spews.org for more info. Spam is abuse of the private networks that make up the internet, and action is best taken at that level, not by some congresscritters that don’t understand the infrastructure or grasp the problem.

Best,
Dev

13

I would take just the opposite approach. Have EVERYBODY respond to each piece of junk mail with a polite no. The sender would get 10 billion responses causing the server to shut down. That would get the sender banned.

14

Sorry. I hope the (Hormel?) legal-eagles aren’t planning to sue.

I think I understand your logic. That sounds like the example I gave before of Howard Carmack, where he earned $360 for sending 10,000,000 email solicitations. Carmack was the sender of the spam[sup]not-TM[/sup] for a client, who paid him $10 for each sale generated. The client later discontinued the arrangement because of “tons of complaints.”

But if both the people pushing the product and the people pushing the marketing method were implementing a losing proposition, I think both sides would eventually learn it didn’t pay. Just like I know not to get involved in a 3-Card-Monte game on the city sidewalk.

And Magiver, flooding the spammer with messages probably wouldn’t work either. Their usual business plan is to hit quick, then pack up and leave for other pastures anyway. By the time the responses arrive, they are long gone.

15

To start, we should really come up with a new word. From what I can tell there are three kinds of spam: 1.) Bulk unsolicited mailing-list type junk (ie block association). Annoying by harmless, usually easy to get out of. 2.) Commercial junk, which seems to be highlighted above and the usual focus of legislation. But this makes up a VERY small portion of the overall problem. 3.) Internet based advertising, ie “click her to see hot lesbian action…”

It’s the third type that I find is the real problem. As an example, I set up a hotmail account art_vandlay@hotmail.com. It was never used, never given out, no messages were ever sent from this account. I checked back in one week later to find it FULL of junk. I think there were 300+ messages.

I had a similar account with yahoo, and just for fun I set up an auto-reply “PLEASE STOP EMAILING ME.” In addition to the 100+ SPAMs I was receiving I also received 100+ bounced messages because there is nothing to reply to. The sites these link to generate revenue by having you visit. If they send a million emails and one person clicks, they’re making money. The problem is that they are not “stealing” your email address, they’re randomly sending to ___@aol.com or what ever server you use.

I don’t really believe any anti-span laws could have an effect. Spamming is just too easy. I predict that with in a few years, email will evolve towards the phone system. It will become slightly more complicated to get an email address, and slightly harder to use it. That’s really the only way.

The entire system would have to become much more centralized. In order to send an email you would have to register with some organization, otherwise you get a busy signal. I’m pessimistic and I see this problem getting a lot worse before it gets any better. Attacking the handful of guys pushing penis enlargers won’t do one bit of good.

16

Simply educating the public about a problem doesn’t work. Just look at the DARE program. If they could somehow track the people behind some of this stuff down, charge them with fraud or something (In the case of the Nigerians who type in all caps and want you to put money in a bank account they have access to), then have them extradicted and make it as messy as possible, I think it would be a step in the right direction.

When it doubt, make an example of somebody. It usually works.

17

To me, that’s a distinction without a difference. ANY mail that I did not request and for a product or service that I have extremely little interest in is spam in my book. If it is truly a scam/fraud, that would seem to be criminal already. But if it is legitimate (dunno how to define that, tho) advertising, it wouldn’t be criminal, just unwanted.

We take care of this difference in the postal service. The USPO takes a dim view of true frauds and prosecutes them vigorously, but they actually court advertisers with low rates to fill up our mailboxes. So why aren’t we complaining about this kind of junk? Probably because we have become so used to it, and the proportion of junk mail to important stuff hasn’t increased as much over the years as email spam has?

18

But there are always new suckers getting online. The spammers themselves also lie about the marketing method they sell. “I’ve got a list of 300,000 opt-in clients.” &c.

Best,
Dev Null

19

Those that have been involved in the problem for some time make the definition one based on consent, not content. Basically, if you send a solicitation that I didn’t ask for, it’s spam. Period. Full stop. End of discussion. You should be prevented from doing so by blocking, shunning, null routing, or, preferably, physical disconnection from the internet.

Spam is not the online equivalent of junk mail. The reason is because with junk mail, the mailer pays the cost of the advertising. They buy the paper and pay the postage. But spam is theft and trespass to chattel. You or your company is paying the price for that advertising. For example, if you are on AOL, three or four dollars a month that you pay for goes to infrastructure required to deal with spam. Bigger pipes, bigger storage, more servers.

Best,
Dev