Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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"
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.