Online Marketers to Stamp out Spam?

CodeHog writes "A group of online marketers want to get rid of spam and are proposing a registry base system for transmitting email. They are calling the project Lumos. Computer World has an aritcle on it Online marketers offer new antispam initiative . Doesn't it seem like these are the same businesses that profit from spam? Even better, this is being proposed by ESPC. The member list doesn't look too anti-spam to me." The obvious issue of course is that most spammers won't follow the rules anyway. My spam is up 20% over the 1st quarter of 2003! Yay!

Comments

Like this is going to save the world

[Blaine Hilton]

This seems like a ploy to legitimize spam. I see this as actually increasing the amount, not decreasing it. The only people that will likely benefits are the advertisers that use this Lumos thing to get their email on a "approve" list. Much like the NAT sensors in a recent slashdot article, this will just make the spammers change their methods, if it even takes off in the first place. Although this plan seems at least to me that it is ill fated, something needs to be done about spam. Like censorship though it's probably best left to the end consumer and not some blind upstream connectivity provider.

Go calculate something

Re:Like this is going to save the world

[Musashi Miyamoto]

I totally agree. This would probably cause you to recieve more spam as a result. However, it might be a bit more cleaned up and "professionalized".

The only way to stop spam is either re-work SMTP or intellegent spam filters... Its hard to knock spam filters nowadays... They are almost artificial intelligence in their ability to spot a spam e-mail. Its amazing... Try a good one like iHateSpam and see... They remove close to 99% of spam.

I predict the first self-aware system will not be a 2001 HAL-like supercomputer, but a spam filter running on someones desktop.

"What are you doing Dave? How about a lower mortgage rate, Dave?"

Re:Like this is going to save the world

[johnnyb]

Having been involved in Internet marketing myself, let me say that most business don't want to send you email that you don't want to receive. That includes the mail houses that send them. The ones I have worked with get between a 10% and 30% _click_ rate. Why? Because send very targetted emails.

Few people are advocating any longer sending mass emails to everyone they can find an address for. Most people have found that using legitimate sources of addresses (such as your customer list, trade-show lists, and small targetted lists) get great results that customers are willing to pay for.

These people are usually sending out up to 10,000 emails at a time.

The professionals involved _want_ email marketing to be legitimate - because it gets higher-dollar business for them.

web log spam

[dirvish]

I know this is kinda off-topic but I am kinda fired up about it right now. I just got done posting a comment to the Antispamist's Spam Forum about the increasing spamming of my web server logs. I am using a script that displays the recent referrers and it is currently half full of spam. Has anyone else had problems with this? This recent bout seems to stem from one guy

me too.

[nege]

I agree- every time I call Verizon I get a nice message in a soothing voice telling me that they respect my privacy. Yet I know they sell my number to telemarketers because I don't give that number to anyone else but personal friends! Then they will sell me some telemarketing blocking technology, and sell the telemarketers anti-telemarketing technology technology and so forth. I don't see how this email stuff will be different...but then again Im completely jaded.

cannot stop spam.

[Musashi Miyamoto]

Unless SMTP is re-worked to disallow false source addresses, spam is not going to be stopped by a system like this. As long as there is no accountability from the sources of spam, it will continue to be pumped out from overseas. Though projects like PennyBlack and SpamNet are good in concept, the only one that has proven to work is intellegent filtering. Spam filters like Spam Inspector remove around 99% of junk email... You need to have one to make using your e-mail account worth using again...

I couldn't imagine my Yahoo mail without their spam controls... (Unlike Hotmail, which spams you themselves)

Re:cannot stop spam.

[AnotherBlackHat]

... the only [spam stopping] that has proven to work is intellegent filtering.

There are two schools of thought on this,
which I like to call "spam assassin" and "spammer assassin".

People in the spam assassin school are interested in not reading spam.
To them, anything that stops them from reading spam "works".
They would rate things like Baysian filtering as incredibly successful.

People in the spammer assassin school are interested in stopping spam from being sent.
They would rate things like Baysian filtering as a dismal failure that "misses the point".

Intelligent filtering is effective against spam,
but not against spammers.
It may or may not "work", just depends on your school of thought.

-- this is not a .sig

This might actually help...

[Ironica]

Consider the movie ratings system. It's not in any way government regulated; it's run entirely by the Motion Picture Association of America. Whatever disputes I have with their policies and practices, you have to admit, the industry has been fairly successful at eliminating the need for government regulation through self-regulation.

It sounds more like these spammers are getting together to find a way to continue sending requested marketing email. Spam has gotten so bad that the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater at the ISP level, before the consumer even implements their own filters. They're afraid of losing the ability to market via e-mail *period*, so they've come up with a way to screen it.

If it actually works as they claim (in terms of unsubscribe rules, identifiability, and so forth) it might be a way ISPs could filter out commercial email that *doesn't* conform to this protocol, while still allowing commercial email to happen.

I'm not saying I think it will (or won't) work, but I think this is probably a sincere attempt to regulate commercial email in a manner that will be acceptable to consumers.

Re:You are a fucking moron

[Ataru]

A while back I was a bit busy so I stopped checking my home email regularly. As I was getting over a hundred spams a day, it was quickly mounting up. A couple of times I sat there and deleted 500 or so, looking carefully for anything from friends and family. Just over a month ago I was overwhelmed. I got 127 today, so now I have 5521 messages in my inbox. That email account is basically fucked. I have no idea if there are any legitimate emails in there. Fucking spammers. Hanging, drawing and quartering is too good for them.

Re:Not all the mail YOU don't want is spam...

[Frostalicious]

Ever wonder why you don't see commercials for Gerritol & Depends on Cartoon Network at 2:00am? No old people are up watching it because the advertisers have a well-defined and mature methodology of knowing where and how to promote their products on TV and they don't have to worry about their audience getting annoyed by ads for things that they don't want.

Don't compare spam email with television ads, there is a fundamental difference.

TV ads help pay for my TV experience.
On the other hand, spam emailers make me pay for receiving their emails, through higher ISP bills.

One of these situations is a mutually beneficial business agreement, and the other is exploitation. Can you guess which is which?

it's a lie.

[twitter]

Funny you should mention the motion picture industry, yet another cartel. Yet Hollywood looks honest next to spammers and phone hucksters. There's nothing sincere about this effort but the desire to make money by obnoxing all of us.

These turkeys just want to keep out their competitors. Shemes to add intelligence to the internet are all designed to make it imposible for any but a select few to send the adverts. They seek legitmacy and government protection for their abuse of a public network. That's not something I'm willing to give up my ability to run a mail server for. Nor do I wish for my ISP to be forced to pay fees for the new service which will garantee spam forever.

So called "accountability" schemes to rework mail protocal are equally evil. The 1:1 network of copper wires known as the telephone system is abused all day long.

The answer is to simply outlaw these obnoxious practices. Unsolicited comercial calls are abuses of public networks and should not be tollerated. People who would abuse their neighbors this way should be fined and put in jail.

Re:Not all the mail YOU don't want is spam...

[Sylver Dragon]

God forbid that you, as an individual, forget to uncheck a box when you bought your last DVD or CD or book or whatever online. God forbid that you own up to your own impatience and your click click click lifestyle that results in you glazing over or not even caring about the terms and conditions of your latest purchase.

There is, in this, a large part of the problem why UCE is viewed in such a dim light. I have highlighted the applicable section. These things should always be opt-in, always and without exception. It really is just a sneaky method of getting people to agree. If it is known that most people will fall into the next-next-next mode when going through a series of forms, and you don't want to send emails people don't want, then your design should plan for this. Have the box unchecked by default, and allow those users who want the email, to check it. You are simply lying to yourself and us if you belive that an opt-out methadology can ever co-exist with the desire to only send email to those that really want it.

Well you know what? These people that do email for a living ARE trying to do something about it and what do we hear on /. ??? The classic "(insert name here) is trying to take our rights away and make money off of us and they suck. Open source forever and Linus rules my world and does email suck so much when blogging is the communication method of the future".

I agree with you here, it would appear that the companies involved in this are making a valid attempt to get the real spam under control. Though, I think this could be better solved by creating a huge opt-in list (which is not sold or publicly printed) such that, if a company wished to send a bulk email campaign, they send it through this list, and it then gets forwarded on to the intended and willing recipients. Probably also have some preference settings, which a recipent selects during sign-up, that allow for filtering based on interests, thus making the ads more targeted. And lastly, allow for immediate remove, by a user, of their email address from a list. Oh, and the hard part, give some sort of value for allowing one's self to be marketed to.
Of course, there would still be those abusers, you will never be rid of them. We will still get our "Enlarge Your Penis and Keep It Up Forever with Viagra" ads, but then we could start working on this problem, and not bother people who run legitamte mail-lists.

Unsubscribe Buttons

[yintercept]

Thanks to Seth Godin, spammers had a year or two where they could claim legitimacy by including an unsubscribe button at the end of the message (the popup that you put on the unsubscribe page often pays for the spam.)

Now that people know the unsubscribe button is a ruse, it no longer buys legitimacy. Making a big national unsubscribe service that is trusted will give the email marketers another year or two of legitimacy.

The funny thing. Spammers themselves tend to hate spam. I should say, they hate the spam sent by competing spam shops. The competing spam dilutes the audience. They especially hate new spam shops. As a result, most would agree to proposals that reduce the over amount of spam...so long as they don't lose their share of the market.

I wouldn't be surprised to see existing spam shops try and form mechanisms that reduced spam, and closed the market to new comers. It would buy legitimacy and preserve their share of the market at a reduced cost.

Of course, the emarketers are in a tight situation...they know the other people in the group are emarketers looking for any advantage and that they cannot be trusted.

Not Surprising: just like drug dealers

[jadavis]

Drug dealers only make their high profits *because* of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The DEA restricts supply to the U.S., thereby increasing prices and taking out the "little guys". Generally, when the DEA gets a tip, it's from a rival drug lord.

It's the same with this SPAM thing. They want fewer "little guys" around so they try to force the supply of SPAM down which increases the effectiveness of their own SPAM. Not altruistic by any means, but if it lands fewer junk emails in my box each day, it's fine by me.