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Counting The Cost Of Spam
Bender Unit 22 writes: "According to a study by the EU Commission, spam costs over 10 billion euro (1 euro is about 0,92$) a year worldwide. The study's analysis of e-mail marketing concentrates on the US market. The commision have made a proposal to update the 'directive on data protection and privacy' in the telecommunications sector. This proposal favours the opt-in approach. Today, opt-ins are required in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Italy and Germany."
Oh yeah, and anyone who gets a fill-in-the-blanks spam letter to send out and gives their name as "fsdfk" should be shot in the head just on principle.
There is a problem with this survey. You have the SPA saying that piracy costs $$$billions in sales. You have the RIAA saying that MP3 and Napster costs $$$billions in sales. You have the MPAA claiming that DeCSS costs them $$$billions because everyone is copying DVDs and putting them online. They claim that each copy means a sale lost, but we know that many of the copies would not translate into sales/losses. How did the EU study calculate losses?
Fight Spammers!
You, sir, are an apologist for spammers, a troll, or worse, somewhat daffy.
...I'm supposed to click on banner ads and read all commercial email... 'cuz I might get a hell of a deal... ever get suckered into a time-share pitch?
Do you really think that spam is necessary, a benefit, one of the 'costs of doing business'? I certainly don't. Spam can be generated by any sixth-grade kid with a TRS-80. It is not the equivalent of advertising, and it is not a 'necessary evil'.
It's time that people either learn to accept reality, or get off the Internet.
Well, that settles it: Flamebait. I'm giving up the chance to mod you down because I want to respond to this, even though I know I am being goaded. It's fun to take this a point at a time.
Spam is not a derogatory term, or you have never heard of a derogatory term. The reference to Monty Python is actually an attempt to disarm the agony of spam with humor. Hubris, if you will. The term "junk mail" is derogatory, however.
Spam is not commercials of the internet. Banner Ads are. Spam is an abuse of the system, taking advantage of a service that has no limits, until people are forced to put limits on the system, making everyone else suffer due to the actions of a few (it's been that way ever since 4th grade gym class).
The basic principles of the free market are not anarchy. There is a code, and spammers violate it.
You talk like the government should not tell businesses how to conduct themselves. The line about the govt being offensive indicates that your relationship with reality is tenuous at best. Hell, I gotta quote it:
The notion that the government should step in and place restrictions on how business should be run is offensive.
That is the governments job. It may be offensive to spammers, but its not nearly as offensive as some internet practices.
Banning Spam != Repealing the First Amendment.
heh, now its my duty to participate in the 'advertising process". I'm sorry, can you contain your spittle as you type this stuff? It is just too too funny.
...anti-spammers are anti-business
...spam is the lifeblood of America
...spam is one of the capitalist principles of a free market
...spam-hating was a fad
...a tiny minority of Americans want to ban spam
...anti-spammers are communists
Thanks. Even though I have been had, I feel like I have been had by one of the best, guy. You really take the cake. What a brilliant exercise in sarcasm!
Thanks for the laugh. It may be on me, but hopefully you have pre-empted any posters who even remotely believe any of the nonsense You posted.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
Since spam itself does not help support the infrastructure of the internet like TV, Radio, Newpapers, etc ... ads do it is a problem. It takes up (unfairly) people's time and computer resources. Not to mention that of the ISP and backbone providers.
I have to believe that most all of the numbers that are floating around out there are based on hypotheticals and conjecture (as well as a little hopefulness [is that a word?] to sway people into thinking that the figure has some sort of real significance).
Or maybe ma bell was telling the truth
"From of old, there are not lacking things that have attained Oneness." - Lao Tzu
All these jackoff corporations going after websites for IP infringement, when in reality they're probably losing more money from spam.
Synchronized cocks!
OK, then how about when EMAIL marketing REALLY takes off and %30 of all national and %30 of local businesses start sending out spam. Oh, and they think you need to be reminded once a month of their woderful products and services. The net result is that you will have 1000 times more spam than real email.
How's that for "getting real?" I live in the bay area - the number of companies that have national scope that could spam me and all the local companies that could spam me would number in the millions. If only 500,000 sent spam once a month,
that would be over 16,000 emails a day. If they only sent it once a year, that's still over 1300 a day. You want that?????? Is spam still free and doesn't cost you much now? Can you effectivly just hit delete anymore?
Let's go further and say that you have to use a modem due to the fact that DSL / cablemodems / etc are not available to you. Let's say that you are lucky and get about a 4K per second download rate.
Just downloading SPAM would take 1.1 HOURS a day! Is spam still "just a little anoying" anymore?
Unless we as a society really start getting aggressive about spam, this will be a reality. Penalties NEED to include jail time. That's the ONLY thing that will stop spam.
I'm trying to figure out what sort of loopholes companies like Doubleclick can make use of to qualify a potential spam recipient as having "opted in" for the "service." IANAL, so I'm going to show a certain amount of ignorance; can such companies make "opting in" a requirement of visitors to a site featuring their banner ads? Or would they have to wait for someone to actually click on the banner before they could say "See, he's interested, let's send him tons of UCE!"
Any attorneys out there who might care to tackle this question? At least as it might relate to current or proposed US or Canadian law?
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
Opt-in really is no better than opt-out -- any idiot who has a grudge against you can submit your name to 1000 sites for registration and all of a sudden your mailbox is unusable. Not only that, then your address gets sold and you get spammed to death.
I tried to convince my last job that people on our mailing list had to "double-opt-in" to be on our mailing list, but the boss said it was "too complicated for users". I have since left that job, bleh.
But you'll be facing a serious collection problem.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
First of all, I don't know that there is a commercial free speech to receive business solicitations in my home. It's a little different in outdoor ads, but when it comes to my home, I can hardly believe there is a "free speech" right for businesses to enter my home and put ads everywhere. And yes, receiving spam is the equivalent. This happens already with snail mail, but that doesn't mean it is so because it is constitutionally guaranteed.
Even if there were a business right to spam, there is the issue of consumer's right to privacy, which I believe is also consitutionally guaranteed. Does that matter? Apparently it doesn't, but it should.
Really, the issue is about what is more important: consumer rights or business rights. I argue that consumer's right to not be bombarded with ads at home outweighs the rights of business to spam me. If you are about to say that it is important for businesses to thrive, which in the end benefits consumers anyway, then great, because it leads to my next point...
Spam is completely anti-business. It is in the nature of spam that any idiot can bulk email millions for almost no cost. If it is not regulated, it will spiral beyond control, because even more idiots will use it. For many people this is the case already. Without government control, it will get worse, and email runs the risk of becoming useless due to extremely low signal/noise ratio.
Unfortunately, none of this really matters, because the people that really cause a problem with spam are the aforementioned idiots that don't care what laws are passed. Without secure mail and authentication, I'm afraid spam is here to stay.
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In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
Not really. The reason that spam costs us (Internet users and ISPs) is the cost of storage and transmission. By the time it hits your computer, the cost has already been imposed. Second, what you are implying by such a proposal is that spam is OK as long as it has ADV: stuck in the subject line. At the moment, spamming is against the AUPs of most ISPs and backbone providers, and many will boot spammers when they are discovered. If your proposal were to become law, spammers may argue in court that such a law would set up a framework by which they can legally spam without their provider being able to cut them off, no matter what the AUP says. Finally, I doubt that such a tag would cut into a spammer's profits too much simply because so few folks respond to spam right now. The reason most spammers do what they do is because a) they've been conned by the spamware vendors into thinking that this is a way to make money on the Net, b) their costs are so low, since the most they usually lose is a $19.95 Internet account, if that, and c) they only have to get a couple of suckers to respond out of the millions of spams they send out in order to turn a profit, albeit a small one. Believe it or not, most spammers aren't getting rich doing this, but the common wisdom is that they've convinced themselves that they're on the road to riches. And don't underestimate the stupidity of people when it comes to making money on the Internet. If you were going to open a business in a brick and mortar store, what general steps would you follow? The usual method is to first come up with a product or service that you see a market for, then build the business around that product or service. I can't count the number of calls I've taken from people who wanted a Web site because they wanted to make money on the Internet, then the next thing they asked me was what products they should be selling once they built the site. Now, these were fairly intelligent people, and they had their priorities totally backwards. Most spammers strike me as borderline to complete idiots with dreams of riches in their heads, so they're willing to eke out whatever profit they can, figuring the big payoff is just around the corner. No, I don't think this proposal is what we need. What we need, IMHO, is a law similar to the junk fax law. Outlaw the garbage, then make high-profile examples of some spammers. If you do that, many of the rest will run scared and find some other scheme that poses less risk. Actually, we really don't need a law to begin doing this; I think that if ISPs made sure they had financial penalty clauses in their AUPs, then aggressively used them against spammers, it'd make a lot of difference. Perhaps ISPs could share the legal costs of court actions by contributing to a common fund that could be drawn upon by participating providers. This would allow smaller ISPs to band together and have the financial resources to go after spammers they might otherwise choose not to sue. They wouldn't have to sue them all; they could sue just enough to turn the anxiety factor way up for anyone considering spam as a way to make money.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
This solves nothing; the majority of the cost is already paid by the time the end user's mail software sees the spam.
Why should we have the entire network paying to transmit millions of copies of messages if the entire point of this is to let everyone delete them? Why bother?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Not at all. Dreamhost requires every new customer to fax a photocopy of the credit card. Is it a pain? Yes. Is it a bad idea? Not at all!
Another idea is that ISPs could refuse to take credit cards that are less than 2 months old.
--
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
No problem. As long as the majority of countries have anti-spam regulation, the rest of the world will blackhole the spam-originating countries untill they acquire a clue and stamp out spam.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
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Not at all. Dreamhost requires every new customer to fax a photocopy of the credit card. Is it a pain? Yes. Is it a bad idea? Not at all!
Which proves that it is legitimate, physically stolen, or the person has a copy of Gimp or Photoshop.
www.eFax.com are spammers
If a business cannot scale beyond the county that they're in, say because they're a construction company and can't reasonably take a contract to build a skyscraper thousands of miles away.. then why would they spam?
My post said that most local businesses and a lot of national business aren't of the nature where adveritising on the national scale doesn't make sense. When was the last time you saw a superbowl ad for a plumber? Or a local auction house? Or a company that makes the little rubber feet that go onto electronic items so they don't scratch your furniture? Or for the maker of an IC?
Not everyone has a potential market that big, hence to think that a large portion of business will ever start doing it is crazy.
I don't like spam as much as the next guy, but to think that you'll ever get thousands a day? Get real.
-bugg
1. All ISPs need to really check the validity of a credit card before authorizing the new customer. If it takes two days to do this, so what? No one needs to get an email account right away at 2am. I suggest a new law that requires credit card companies to provide some method that can absolutely determine whether a credit card is valid, and that ISPs are required to use this service.
2. All ISPs need to charge a user's credit card some hefty fine if the account is used to send spam. Just terminating the account is not enough. I fine must be levied.
3. ISPs must be held legally liable for obvious security holes, such as open SMTP relays. If I own a couple of pit bulls and I accidentally leave my front gate open and the dogs attack someone, I'm responsible, regardless of how that gate got open. If I can prove that someone else maliciously opened the gate, then he's the one in trouble, not me. But that burden of proof lies on me. The same standard should be applied to ISPs.
--
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
You have a right to talk, print up things, post a webpage, etc, and I have a right to voluntarily choose to go listen. That is the extent of free speech protection guaranteed by the first amendment as I see it. The government cannot interfere with your ability to make protected free speech or my ability to listen to you make it in whatever form you are making it.
However, I have a similar right to NOT listen. You cannot take away that right any more than the government can. Therefore, it is perfectly OK for you to set up a web page about your product or your political campaign but not for you send me email.
In a similar vein, it is only ok for political and other solicitors to come to my house because I have explicitly agreed to let them by not posting no tresspassing/no soliciting signs. I could, and could tell them to get off my land whenever they appeared, and that would be the opt-out answer to that problem. Some people do that. But they have no inherent right to make you listen to them by wandering onto your property. They can stand somewhere and you can go talk to them, or you can agree to let them come talk to you either explicitly or implicitly, but that's about it.
What seems to have been missed in the comments so far is so obvious it's pathetic. There is nothing wrong with advertising. As annoying as it can be, we all know better than to think if it goes away the 'net will be the same as before but without the ads. Spam is different.
When you get junk mail via snail mail, sure, you have to sort through it and throw out the ads. But that's not where the money is lost with spam. Junk snail mailers pay the post office to send their spam. The infrastructure of the mail system is not threatened because people are paying to advertise. Banner ads can clutter a site, but the owner of the site is getting paid. It's a symbiotic relationship.
Spammers Dont Pay Their Share For the Internet Infrastructure Used. Spammers usually sign up for a dialup account meant for residential use, spam all night, and get their accounts shut off the next day. Often they signed up with a fake credit card number, but by the time the ISP tries to verify it the next morning it's too late. The meatspace equivalent of spam would be a bulk snail mailer forging stamps and putting their bulk mail in the box without paying the postage.
Sure getting advertisements from JC Penney once a week is annoying. But JC Penney pays for their own mail servers and will let you unsubscribe. The real problem is Joe Schmoe entrepreneur who sees a quick buck by setting up some sort of scam and getting "free postage" to send out their advertisements with no legitimate contact info and no way to be removed from their list.
Think, people!
I'm sure it varies tremendously depending on the targetting of the spam, but one published example is LifeMinders.com, who say their opt-in mail lists get click-throughs from one in ten recipients. Seems way high, but part of their schtick is that ask what you're interested in when you sign up...their whole business model is sending "helpful reminder messages," and it really is legitimately an opt-in system. But even if it's totally untargetted, undesired mail, so what if only one in a thousand click on a link? The cost of e-mail is very low, and the returns can be high. With porn sites, for example, referral fees are typically $20-40 per person who joins with a credit card, so if one in 50,000 recipients sign up, and you send ten million messages (not uncommon), that means 200 signups, or $4000-$8000 for one hard day of spamming. You have some real costs at that level, and certainly lots of hassles with complaints and account closures, but people obviously find it worth the trouble, or such spam wouldn't be so common.
SPAM is a billion dollar industry?? In 10 years from now, when MS have a "monopoly" over SPAM, will the Department of Justice step in?
Just because you have the right to say something, you do not have the right to make me use my resources (or resources that I have paid for) to listen to you. Have you ever had junk mail come "Postage due"?
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
Hardly. Shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is a content restriction. Method restrictions are different.
Suppose I go buy a massive PA system and set it up outside your house. Then I and some pals start shouting about our great new MLM scheme. Around the clock. For days.
If you call the cops, they will come by and ask me to stop. If I don't, they'll arrest me pronto. This would even apply if I was making political speeches or reading poetry. Why doesn't the constitution protect me? Because the cops are rightly suppressing a public nuisance. The content is entirely irrelevant; it's all about the method.
So as the original poster wrote, "Free speech means that you can say whatever you want, not that you can say it however you want." If you think it should be otherwise, let me know where you live so I can drop by and tatoo my messages on your forehead.
My post said that most local businesses and a lot of national business aren't of the nature where adveritising on the national scale doesn't make sense. When was the last time you saw a superbowl ad for a plumber?
True, but irrelevant. Spam is cheap, and cost shifting makes it even cheaper. I get two or three spams a day for businesses in Argentina; I've never even been to Argentina. Why? Because it's more expensive to carefully target your email than it is to just send out a few million extra and live with the decreased response rate.
I don't like spam as much as the next guy, but to think that you'll ever get thousands a day? Get real.
Ten years ago, I got zero. Five years ago, I got one or two. Today, I get maybe 30 a day, despite extensive technological and social measures to reduce spam. Since you seem to have the answers, care to tell me what the maximum number I'll get is? Don't forget to include the fact that only a small percentage of potential internet users are currently on the net.
You're right that it won't be thousands a day, because I'll abandon email entirely at that point. But Moore's law makes spamming ever cheaper and Metcalfe's law makes it ever more useful. Pretending that spamming won't get worse is just sticking your head in the sand.
Sneakemail is a really cool service. It lets you create disposable emailadresses.
Whenever you need to give out your email-address (and it needs to be a real working address), you just create a new one at Sneakemail.
You should only use each sneakemail address for one service/site/whatever. Why, you ask?
Well, if you later gets spam on that address (which you only have given to the site "http://wesellsyouraddresstospammers.com" then you will know that either they have sent spam to you, or some spammer in some way have bought your address from that company. After telling that company how much you disgust them, you can just delete the address and they have a fake address.
Together with Spamcop you are ready to fight the spammers!
Greetings Joergen
spam does have a much higher response rate than
you are estimating. It's probably about equal to that of a postal bulk mailing, which is 2%
Proof please?
I know a LOT of people who use the internet - most of them are "average" users.
_NONE_ of them (as in ZERO) have ever responded to spam.
Ever.
I have no formal studies, but that's enough to convince me that your 2% is just hot air.
So, please provide a link to some studies to back up your claim.
Trying to control any mentions of anything remotely related to your trademark is not reasonable. You have the right to prevent others from using it to represent their products. That is all. Slashdot does not sell meat products, and therefore Hormel has no justification in complaining.
You modded yourself up. Be a man and admit it.
If you knew anything about how this site works, you'd know that it's impossible to moderate in a thread once you've posted in it.
That means you can't moderate yourself up.
==Shoeboy
One ironic part of the internet is that every user thinks that they should have ultimite protection of free speech... these same activists want to ban a form of speech that they happen to not like - spam
Spam is not a form of speech, it's a method of speech. Free speech means that you can say whatever you want, not that you can say it however you want.
Please! No spamming the birds. The Linux Pimp
--It's Pimptastic!--
If you really think spam is OK, consider these figures:
There are about 5.7 million businesses in the US. Now assume that only 1% of those decide to send out spam, and that they send out only one spam per year. That's still 156 messages in your mailbox daily, on average. Some days you might get more.
Given how cheap it is to send out spam, it's very likely that more than 1% of businesses would partake, and also unlikely they would limit themselves to 1 message a year.
Spam is only merely an inconvience as long as the companies that partake are kept underground. If spam is legimized, you can be sure it will be a severe problem.
In order:
- Spam email goes through an outgoing mail server. Spammer has most likely paid for server time, so it's not that big.
- Repeat process for several servers, depending on where the message is going. Spammer is no longer paying for server time or transmission costs...but somebody somewhere is.
- End user receives message through incoming mail server. End user is paying for service, and getting that spam email costs him money. You pay for the service that receives your mail, you pay for the time you spend online checking your mail, and you pay for the time you spend reading/deleting/blocking/forwarding to abuse@[spammer's ISP].
Since in the end you the email recipient are paying to see the message, it's almost as if a credit-card company started sending you "pre-approved" card offers every day...postage due. Add to that the servers in between, which cost money to operate, and the number of servers and networks that get clogged by the occasional spammer who emails a couple million people at a time, and the cost mounts up very very quickly.Using the SPAM can as the topic icon goes against Hormel Foods', the makers of SPAM, requests that their product not be used in conjunction with unsolicited commerical email. (Full statement on their webpage along with the story of why UCE is called "spam.")
Anyway, I'd like to suggest a new icon for this topic, since the current icon really should be changed. My suggestion is to create an image of three Vikings with the words "spam spam spam" over their heads. It would invoke the original "spam" meaning, which is what the spam topic is truly about, without violating Hormel Foods' quite reasonable request that their product image not be used in conjunction with UCE.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Woah. When you registered, was there an agreement that you didn't bother to click? Even if not, them emailing you (provided it's rare and is related to the product) is reasonable and legitimate. Selling your address would be not.
Ah, but now YOU are spamming.
Send in the attack dogs!
Ah, right. The 'fire in crowded theatre' approach. As long as we can restrict methods of free speech, perhaps we should only allow free speech from prison cells. Say whatever you want (not that anyone will hear you.)
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
The law says that a fax-spammer can't send more than one per year to each recipient, and there's practically no way to enforce the law. For example, to whom do you report a fax-spammer?
I get junk faxes all the time, and at first I searched and called and threatened. The faxers know that the cost of collecting is way too high. They're careful to send only a few faxes per year (per shell company, of course). They try to appear to take the complainers seriously, and they'll take you off their lists if you give them enough info to do so (unlike email spammers).
What we want for email spam is a national opt-out list, and huge penalties for spamming people who are on that list. I don't want to let them spam me even once per year, or they'll set up multiple shell companies sharing lists but not domains, and spam the hell out of us anyway.
If you don't like spam, I recommend sneakemail. I haven't given out my real address to sites or businesses in months. I've seen a reduction in my spam intake (except for some place that continues to think I'm a debt ridden home owner looking to start a business on the internet). YMMV, but I like this better than the filter war I was in--gives me the trump card.
(C) Kaki Sain, 2011. By reading this, you have illegally copied my property to your brain.
2) Mandatory Opt-in lists will only work if you have filters in place that only allow "verified" addresses to get into your inbox.
The way my former employer does it, if someone is seen to have opted in for mailings, he or she is sent a single confirmation message and must click a link in that message to receive anything more. MAPS calls this "closed-loop subscription."
If successfully enforced, such a system could reduce the noise a bit.
I just skimmed all the posts and I wanted to point something out using a mix of the comments.
1) You'll never "stop" spam, or be able to force and ADV: tag. Don't even ponder it, it's not worth the effort.
2) Mandatory Opt-in lists will only work if you have filters in place that only allow "verified" addresses to get into your inbox. That means tons more server space holding all sorts of lists and certificates of verified sources, and anyone not on that list (a customer, a old pal from grade school, Publisher's Clearing House, etc) will never be able to contact you. Blah to that notion.
3) When spam hits your inbox, it IS too late (as several people already said). The effort and CPU cycles are already used. For me to click delete a few times or spend an extra 4 seconds a day on the modem is negligable in a real-world sense. Sure it's annoying, but so is traffic on the highways. That's life, oh well.
4) Lastly, the only REAL way to ever -STOP- spam, or even slow down, is for the bigtime IT guys to say enough is enough and tweak their servers. We have known for a LONG time that a LARGE percentage of spam comes from a certain popular web provider's servers. It's high time that some of the decent IT departments out there got together and started cutting off incoming traffic from servers that have a proven track record of "we don't give a damn about security or IP verification." I imagine that it would only take a few weeks of embargos to convince the other companies to shape up their act. Sure, we can't get them all, but if the bulk of spam is coming from a KNOWN common location, why not plug up that gap?
Yes, I know we'll have to keep plugging gaps, but everyone knows that the best way to approach security is not to be 100% secure, but to be secure enough that the enemy gives up or leaves to find an easier target.
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Let me give you the lowdown
Let me get this straight.
First, I hate spam, and spammers, and make every effort not do do business with spammers. HOWEVER...
10 billion euros a year? How so?
I get alot of spam (say 20 messages a day) but I'd have trouble suggesting they cost me *anything* at all. They cost me a few moments to delete. Oh yes, they aggrivate me, and perhaps an American lawyer can tell me how to put an economic value on some slight aggrivation.. but really.. give it a rest.
We need to be able to make it profitable to track down, bill, and collect money from spammers to cover costs. Right now it is entirely way too cost free for them to stop. They will stop when there is no longer any advantadge to this.
The solution I've proposed in the paste is to licence them, make enforcement of the license a federal/central goverment matter.
the licensing is so that they are "tagged" AND can be easily identified. Sort of like a Tax ID number, etc. ISPs and users can use this number to bill them since the data is a public record. make the cost higher than common mail.
Point being that if there is a profit in tracking down spammers, and it is very costly to send spam, then it will stop.
We got to hurt them in the pocket book
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
is when sites like eBay change your spam settings without your approval.
Real bothersome that it required me to take additional time outside of my day to click the stupid links to disable eBay's advertising crap, in order to make sure "thats what I really intended" I'd love to see legislation make it fully illegal to spam without explicit opt in (and no cheeky stuff either, like hidden form tags or by saying "Clicking any link in our site opts you in for our spam" - but an explicit mark the box kinda opt in)
Oh well, thats my $.02
Information is the catalyst for revolution
Try using the Spam Calculator on Brightmail's website. It uses several different variables in calulating the cost to all Internet users, and it assumes an annual cost of $255 million. You also have the option of entering your own values for the variables and calculating the annual cost based on those values.
this would make spaming useless and it would cut off after a while because no one would even be bothered with reading the subject line.
oh and if you say being forced to add a prefix to teh subject line of an email is a violation of free speach im going to cut your balls off with rusty garden clippers. and yes i am a member of the ACLU
--aiee
Here is the site
Linuxisforcommunists.org
They want to. But there's no control over the junk coming in unless you use things like RBL and ORBS. Yet you have another vocal group of whiners that try to destroy all that and further promote spamming while giving lip service to idealistic TCP/IP.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
In the US, that'll stop spam dead in its tracks. Allow the user to sue and the ISP to sue. If the ISP shows complacency then sue/fine them too. LOL.
And that is how you turn 10 billion dollars' worth of network abuse into zilch in 2 months flat.
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
To correct your assumptions:
..... aww, forget it - I've already wasted 2 minutes of my life on you already.
"I don't like spam",
"I especially dislike unsolicited advertising",
"Spam is a very difficult thing to filter",
"I wish people would make an honest living" and
"Spam will die because it will eventually be ineffective"
One point unsolicited e-mail advertisers fail to realise is that like other channels, e-mail can be abused. Sending 10 thousand people the same e-mail constitutes abuse of the entire system we know as the Internet as it uses bandwidth that very well could be used for more important things. If a company abuses the phone, electricity, water systems in the same way, they are subject to large penalties. When will the same types of penalties apply to the Internet??
I've never seen a better use of the Anonymous Coward moniker. Someone says I'm whining just because I exercise my right to an opinion and then hides behind anonymity. If you really want me to take you seriously
----- rL
It may be wrong, but thats the cost of freedom, people do bad shit occassionally. For instance if you ban spam, then you also have to ban unsolicited snail mail, telephone solicitation, door-to-door sales(vaccuum cleaner guy, the boy scouts & camp fire & the local church, etc).
Of the things you mentioned, I would sincerely like to see all of them but the non-profits banned. ESPECIALLY telephone solicitation!
In many places, it IS illegal to solicit door to door if there is a sign indicating that it's unwelcome. It IS illegal in the real world to solicit someone over the telephone once they have told you not to call again.
The problem is, nearly 100% of SPAM is a theft or abuse of service. Typically, the routine goes:
Some add the additional insult of: Move email addresses of complainers to the verified list and sell for 99.95 (In violation of their simple request to be left alone). Then there's the ones who use a valid email address (not theirs) as a reply address.
Added to all of that, about half the spam I get is for scams that ARE, in fact, illegal to send over smail mail.
All of the steps spammers take is based on their certain knowledge that they will annoy a great many people and their desire to avoid hearing from the people that didn't want to hear from them (nice hypocracy).
I have a problem with people that insist I need to be advertised to, because I'd rather not be.
For example, a new radio station where I live had commericial free music for two months and it was great. After they introduced commercials and news, commentary, etc. I stopped listening. I wasn't the only one. This should be telling to advertisers trying to market to "Generation Y" (or "d" if you are that young).
While it's nice to know about the next great product, do I really need 100 or so new products clogging my brain (or my e-mail inbox) every day? What if people clogged your voice mail in such a way??
I disagree that the best way to market to people on the net is by effectively spamming them. This makes their e-mail less useful to them. Filtering software can only pick out so many unsolicited e-mails before it starts picking out e-mails that were actually sent to you PERSONALLY.
It's also a damn shame that people insist on making a buck everywhere they go, but this is the world we live in. Sending 100,000 e-mails is probably cheaper than sending 1,000 flyers to people via snail mail. If you get a greater response, who cares right?
In the short term future, this technique will still work. However, as more and more people treat spamming as a social faux pas, we will see less and less businesses using it as an advertising avenue, simply because no one will respond.
----- rL
I'm a sys admin for a small company with two sides, one non and one for profit and with about 50 total employees in the US. I make US$50k per year, or about $25 an hour. Each day, I spend about two hours or possibly more weeding through the spam that gets sent to us from a variety of email addresses and I put filters on our mail server to then block those email addresses and in some cases the server. Then I might also send out warning emails to the admin of those servers and even an email to the fine folks at the RBL if the spammer is a repeat offender. If I'm lucky (like yesterday), I track the spammer down to the source, call the ISP, have a nice chat with their admin and find out this is the 3rd time this month the bitch has been tracked down, and presto change-o that spammer is now looking for a new ISP and T1 provider.
So, for the sake of easy math, about two hours out of my day, 5 or 6 days a week but we'll call it 5 since I'm on salary. So with 52 weeks a year, it costs my employer about US$13000 anually for MY time alone which the spammers have in effect stolen from my employer.
That doesn't count the time of the other people in office and out who get spam and have to delete it, the time I'm sure which is wasted by the foolish ones who actually read the f*cking things (lets face it... what salesman WOULDN'T read the one about how to enlarge their weiner in 30 days?).
There are, of course, some days when there is much less spam, some when there might be more since we have to list our email addresses at a variety of locations and it is unavoidable that our "info@" address will be used.
So if you think about the number of poor slobs in my situation, in the Boston area where I am, there are probably thousands. And if even half of them spend time trying to take a bite out of spam, that would add up to millions of dollars pissed through just to keep some moron from sending out this crap. And if you think about the amount of time we have to spend looking up security patches for sendmail, Exchange, etc., to keep some of the more technical of spammers from using our servers to send their junk, it would add up to even more. And for what? I can not imagine that spammers actually make enough from this to have it be worth their while! But they have to, because why else would these jackasses keep doing it?
*sigh* ah well... it gives me something to do on days I don't have users to LART.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
I don't like electronic spam one bit.
However, I bet realworld spam cost us a hundred times of what electronic spam cost us.
Think about it:
* Trees have to be cut down to make the paper
* Plastics is used
* A lot of polution is produced when the spam is delivered.
And so on...
All theese processes consume a lot of energy, which we get from more or less unclean sources.
You can also count on the wear on our roads and such...
The list can go on forever but I think I've made my point.
I see alot of posts saying to the effect "a little bit of spam doesn't cost or hurt" but it does really hurt.
When a kid can register for an hotmail address and a couple days later be receiving emails for porno that he didn't even ask for. That's just WRONG.
It's also wrong to have to "forge" email headers to deliver spam, because putting your real email address there would get you into trouble. Having to lie to do something is just plain WRONG.
The spam I get in my email box are not from anybody who wants to do me a favor (like get paid for having sex, we have free money to give you), but rather from people who want to rip me off. That's just plain WRONG.
Scraping my email off a website/newsgroup and because I like to participate in a specific discussion - and using it to try and rip me off is just plain WRONG.
There are no "good" spammers. Just people who think sending 50K emails an hour is "good". They're just plain WRONG
For the same reasons we have a post office that handles junkmail/direct marketing in a specific way with specific laws, so to we need laws to handle the "spam disease".
The lame "we can't pass any laws because the internet is "international" is bullshit. The telephone is international too, that doesn't mean you can harass me with it. Besides, all the companies above are US based. Let's start with taking out the bastard trash in our corner of the world, and worry about the rest later.
There is so much time-sucking, bandwidth-sucking, hassle-sucking spam out there, that for the same reasons people pass laws against mail and telephone fraud, so to people need to get sick of spam mail and pass laws against Unsolicited Bulk Email.
Here's a little something to help those of us who are fed up cope a little.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
There's only one way I can see to stop spam... don't click and don't read. If we as spammees choose not to participate then the game will end. Idiots that click through and especially those that buy perpetuate the problem. Boycotting businesses that spam will decrease the time time will take to get the message across.
G
1) Urge all ISP's to add a clause that in their policy that sending mail with forged headers will cause termination of service and a fine of $25 per mail sent.
2) Invest 10% of the income from these fines in rewards for catching elusive spammers and providing evidence against them.
3) Tighten the laws in various countries so that sending mail with forged headers counts as fraud, mail fraud, or something similar, and is punishable by a hefty fine or even jail time. If possible criminalize the sending of forged mail from anywhere to within the jurisdiction, as well as from the jurisdction to anywhere in the world.
This still leaves those spammers who actually use their own name in the neaders, but they are a minority, and knowing who they are, we can organize boycotts, mail campaigns, and other forms of civil disobedience to make them see the errors of their ways.
In Murphy We Turst
http://www.abracashop.com/recipes/SPAM.htm
From the article:
"In Khrushchev Remembers, Nikita Khrushchev credited SPAM for keeping the Soviet Army alive during World War II. "We had lost our most fertile, food-bearing lands, the Ukraine and the Northern Caucasians. Without SPAM, we wouldn't have been able to feed our army."
Cost of spam? Priceless!
You can't handle the truth.
I've worked for several email marketing companies. Some were very good, requiring opt-in on everything. Others weren't as good, although anyone from any of these companies would tell you, "we don't spam." This is a problem in the industry, and it must be addressed for the spam to stop.
I've seen the future, I've worked there. I don't see spam going away, no matter how much it costs or annoys us, nor do I see addresses not being sold and used for "direct mail".
I hear lots of talk about requiring "opt in", but can the US really do that? I don't opt in when a political canidate comes to my door to sell me on his campaign - and I shouldn't, for that's what free speech means. Where in the constitution does the federal government get that power (and don't say "regulating interstate commerce!"). Why would a government that allows sale of postal addresses (a physical safety threat!) but not allow sale of "virtual" addresses?
One ironic part of the internet is that every user thinks that they should have ultimite protection of free speech, and that the Internet should never be censored. We should be able to view our porn without risk of being jailed. Yet, at the same time, while porn is considered protected by internet activists (although, it could be argued, forms of pornography harm society) - these same activists want to ban a form of speech that they happen to not like - spam.
Oh, that's right, spam costs the sender money. You see, in the US, where we pay $19.95 for unlimited internet access, we consider a modem downloading a few thousands ones to be "expensive". Face it: it's not. True, some spammers have abused other's resources, but there will be many who don't. (Spammers may even pay a fee to the ISP affected by the spam, the same way junk mailers pay the post office - but I bet people will still hate the spam just as much) You still pay for postal junk mail, too. You might even pay more for postal mail than for spam! My time is fairly valuable, as I have a limited amount of it in my lifetime. I venture to say it takes slightly more time to throw away a junk postal mail than to delete a spam email (especially if the postal mail is a credit card application, and I'd rather someone else didn't use that information). Yet, my time is considered less valuble than a fraction of a cent that it costs a spam to sit on some server.
Oh, and for the record: I hate spam. But, I realize that I live in a free society and sometimes people do things that I really don't like. True freedom is only possible when someone can anger another without fear of the law or their safety.
How about ISPs simply put a clause in the service contract, something like "If you send UCE, advertise the site we host for you with UCE, or receive emails solicited via UCE on your mail account, you will owe us $10000 (adjust the currency symbol and amount as needed) per incident. We WON'T cancel your account, but we WILL disable it. If you fail to pay, we WILL destroy your credit rating, we WILL garnish your pay, we WILL charge you 5% interest per month, and we WILL make your physical address and name public on our 'Spammers Hall of Shame' page."
www.eFax.com are spammers
I hope spam does not become the advertising choose of the internet. Televison ads do not cost the consumer a thing execpt the cost of your TV and cable service. Also with televison ads the do not take away resources from the consumer.
Yes I do believe the banner ads are a nessary evil of the internet but not spamming. You can choose what websites you can go you can not choose who sends you junk e-mail. The difference between junk mail and junk e-mail is that junk mail does not cost you a thing to recieve it. Now junk e-mail it cost you your computer and a monthly fee inorder for you to get junk e-mail. Also junk e-mail also take up your ISP's and your personal computer's resources. Your argument is flawed my friend. Have a good day