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February 01, 2005

CAN Spam?

Oops. It looks like the CAN SPAM Act isn't working too well. I could have told you that. One clue from the NYT article: a spammer who sends out 200 million messages can expect about 2,000 people to bite. If they are buying $50 bottles of whatever pills, the spammer might get about $12.50 a bottle. That's $25,000.

So, doing the math, as long as you can send out 80 emails for less than $.01, a spammer will start making money. My guess is that it's more like 1000 emails for a penny, which means in the example above the spammer takes in $25,000 on expenses of maybe $2,000 for a whopping profit of $23,000 and a return of over 1,000%. I'm in the wrong line of work...

The problem with spam is that anyone can do it. That's one of the great things about the internet -- there isn't much barrier of entry for anything, but at a point someone else's freedom can infringe on your own. So what to do? I think the only true long term solution is to meter your email. Require postage, so to speak.

It's not my original idea (and I can't remember where I read it) but imagine being able to charge variable amounts to people that wanted to email you. For your friends and associates, you could set the meter to free. But for all other addresses you could pick your price. Maybe you like getting unsolicited "dumb" spam offers -- set it to free or even .0125 cents -- the break even price for the spammer in the NYT article linked above.

I don't like getting "dumb" offers, or offers where some spammer sends some product to every imaginable email, but the kind of "spammer" that is willing to spend 1 cent, 5 cents or maybe even $1 to reach me might actually have something I want to buy.

As much as we don't like telemarketers or junk mail, they're usually at least offering something we'd conceivably want to buy -- long distance service, magazine subscriptions, binoculars, etc. That's because those calls or direct mail cost more than $.000125 and they've done some research that suggests that their targets are interested in the product or service they are selling. Spam on the other hand is like being solicited on the street -- the person doesn't know anything about you and is just trying to get lucky. They figure if they ask enough people some sucker will bite. Telemarketers or junk mailers, on the other hand, figure if they mail enough binocular catalogues to people who have recently bought binoculars, someone will want to buy another pair. Big difference.

Of course, I suspect that many people will be violently against email metering, regardless of the details. But it's not that alien a concept, in fact most of the rest of the world treats cell phone calls the same way (buyer pays). Recently Earthlink and Sonny Perdue unveiled a law that allows Earthlink to go after spammers that send more than 10,000 emails. I'm not saying that's a bad idea, but why should Earthlink have to hunt down spammers when they could just let their customers charge those same guys postage to use their servers?

Posted by Chris at February 1, 2005 12:07 AM

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