Slashdot Mirror
Bulk Email Tax Getting Closer
Strudelkugel writes "The Financial Times reports a growing interest in the concept of bulk email fees: Direct Marketing Association and libertarians oppose, ISPs and companies losing marketing messages to spam filters in favor. Then there's the rest of us."
"Direct Marketing Association and libertarians oppose"
DMA: we're scared.
Libertarians: the DMA will be dead, soon, anyway, so why get the government involved.
Vote in November. You won't regret it.
This would be capitally stupid. Just like CAN-SPAM, it would legitimize spam! Once the spamming scumbags PAY for it, your ISP would not be allowed to block it!
So all those thousands of messages that are blocked now at the ISP level and higher would flow down to your poor little inbox. Suddenly your inbox is 99.6% spam, and most of your bandwidth is dedicated to downloading it. That would be the end of email.
...we're all in trouble. Once AOL realizes they can charge even so much as a penny for spam, it won't be long before some executive, eager to show a profit for his department at a shareholder's meeting will realize he can start charging for incoming or outgoing e-mail.
Then Earthlink, MSN, and everyone else will realize they can do the same thing and within a year or two e-mail won't be free anymore -- at least if you're sending to the big guys.
Then again, once that gets to be common practice, someone will probably realize they can gain customers by advertising as the one major ISP that doesn't charge for e-mail, so maybe there'll be a balance.
But I don't trust the big guys to charge for spam only and realize they could charge for other e-mail and NOT charge everyone else. Remember, in America, profit is the bottom line and just about all most businesses care about.
Given that most of our problems with spam involve open relays and off-shore spam hauses, how exactly do they plan to force anyone to pay a fee?
What will happen is that outlaws will continue to send spam as they do now, and only legitimate users will be assessed a fee.
Meanwhile, the impetus behind this comes from (emphasis mine) News flash to corporations that have adopted online marketing: I consider your email to be to be spam as much as email from anyone using an open relay. It's not that the email contains porn, or 419 come-ons, or a "great opportunity" to do business with eMarketeer -- it's the fact that it's in my inbox, not what it contains, that steals my time and inflames my temper.
So there may be a "growing interest", but it's not on the part of actual end-users. This is purely a fight between unscrupulous, time stealing marketeers without Boards of Directors -- that is, traditional spammers -- and unscrupulous, time stealing marketeers with Boards of Directors -- that is, companies in the Direct Marketing association.
The idea that you're magically morally clean if you're a cheating MBAstard with offices in the "good" part of town doesn't wash anymore.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Just goes to show you, the best things are free.
Procmail and a good set of rules does wonders. I have a rather strict set myself. It gets around 99% of spam, and about 5% of legit mail. I'm willing to live with that considering it deletes THOUSANDS of spam messages. And yes I know since the setup I have does the following:
1) Check the email for "flags" and mark add to the header X-Header: Spam-RC [Rule name it matched on]
2) Count the number of flags in header >= 3 remove from inbox and add to gzipped file.
3) End of every day report list of messages deleted (From and Subject Only)
4) Delete all gzip archives older then two weeks. That way I can go back and get a valid message.
This doesn't work for everyone, but I'm very happy with it. In addition, even if you don't host your own email, you can use fetchmail + procmail no matter what your ISP does.
If the ISPs begin charging for email, and the system is put in place by federal law, it is likely that there will be a ban on spam filters at the ISP level, at least for spam that is in compliance with the regs.
I do not want to see spam legitimized by law. I enjoy the effective spam filtering my email provider has implemented. Actually, they are not likely to be affected by this because they are not in the US, but do not think there is any reason that US based email providers should be prevented from filtering spam, and I do not trust the DMA or other Corps to come up with a definition of spam the I or other users would agree with.
The largest ISPs are being insincere about the spam issue, and are attempting to ensure that their spam spewing customers are protected while they can enjoy increased revenues by helping the spammers to stuff our inboxes.
They (MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, Comcast, etc) do not want to stop spam, they only wish to get rich off of it.
Read, L
But advocates of a fee-based system for bulk e-mail believe it would help distinguish between legitimate e-mail from respectable corporations and offensive spam from shady operators who presumably could not afford to send tens of millions of messages a day.
Okay, but what about the guys who are NOT corporations and are NOT shady operators? What about guys like me who run small to medium internet sites with less than 100,000 registered members on which their entire SERVICE is based on communication through email? (Registration notifications, password reminders, auction notices, etc)?
This is going to drive spammers under ground even further (or out of the company) and put the big corporations in the power-seat. And it's going to leave the honest guy trying to make a living (or run his hobby) who does no harm to anyone, right out of "business".
This is a worse idea than the Tarriff-22/CARP thing they tried in 2002/2003, where they wanted to tax EVERYONE who broadcasts music in any form, per listener, whether or not the person had direct permission of the artist and whether or not the artist had anythign to do with the music associations - and then distribute that tax to the top few dozen artists.
In other words, if Mr. McSmallBand records a CD for free and gives it to you with permission to play it on your online radio station, you have to pay a fee for every person who listens to that song to the government association and that association redstributes it to the top RIAA recording artists, even though they have NOTHING to do with it and the artist that you played isn't even a member of them or signed by anyone.
This is EXACTLY the same and JUST as bad, if not worse. This WILL DRIVE ME OUT OF MY HOBBY... And I have never harmed ANYONE and I DO NOT SPAM ANYONE. This is fucked up and I'm seriously pissed off.
I'm not sure what you have against MBA's but you really need some anger management. Maybe try changing your email address, setup one for signups (where you must sign up to login) and one for junk mail. I get 1 in 1000 as a spam from my primary email account, 90% of my signup account is spam and almost 100% (by definition) of my junk account is spam. I use yahoo for the junk accounts and my company address for my personal account (btw I own the company so I doubt I'll get fired for using it for personal business).
How many people are outraged by spam and telemarketers, but wouldn't bat an eyelash to getting junk mail? There's an obvious difference, the cost of sending is placed upon the advertiser, rather than the recipient when it comes to US postal, it's also far less intrusive.
Let's face it though, if it's not bills, what else comes in your snail mail inbox? More and more people are using email to replace snail mail, even during the Iraq conflict, email and phone were used to convey messages to friends and families. It is because society has relegated these forms of communication that we find spam and telemarketers so abhorrent. They intrude upon our private lives, take away significant portions of our time.
Parsing mail logs on an MTA I run for several domains, the amount of incoming spam has been increasing steadily. For people who abhor RBL's (and what they stand for), let me tell you it's getting to the point where the bandwidth constraints for spam are growing to the point where RBL lists must be considered, if only to prevent the levels of bandwidth usage for delivering the data portion of the email into the MTA, only to be rejected by another filter at the user's inbox level.
I get sick and tired of people saying, "they're fine with spam", or "they're getting used to it". This selfish myopia is exactly what's wrong with this country and how it legislates laws. There are technical reasons as to why spam has become problematic, and imposing some 'tariff or charge' upon the general populace won't deter people from going offshore to peddle their message, and furthermore having advertisers flood my inbox.
Bandwidth isn't cheap. There's a lot of websites that usually charge for their content, or provide a captive audience that allows for ads to be directed. Email is not a captive audience, and it's assanine to assume as such.
Who's the brainchild that comes up with these emails that attempt to bypass filters explicitly put into place to stop them? Do these obvious failures at sentient thought processes understand that people don't want to see their message, and attempting to go around filters only pisses people off more. It's these same brain surgeons who came up with popup advertising, and you have to wonder what levels of cloning testing was done to create these marketing wizards.
Then there's the rest of us.
That says it all.
Seems to me that every anti-spam scheme suffers from one basic problem, that spammers increasingly rely on hijacked broadband computers to spew their bile. The "legitimate" spammers, those who actually use their own computers and net connection, will have to pay, those who use hijacked computers won't, and ordinary people who have no idea their computer has been hijacked, and have no idea how to prevent it, will be the real victims.
Sure it's fun to think of all those lusers finally getting a clue in the form of a big fat bill, and all those mad as hell lusers beating on Microsoft for shoddy software, but be realistic, this is a roadblock, and none of these schemes will come to pass as long as hijacked computers get the bill.
Infuriate left and right
And email will be saved ? unless the ?good guys? mess it up. Microsoft (and I?m no MS basher) wants to make a little bit ? just a tiny bit ? off of every email sent. And that will cause a huge change in how email is used. Does the NYTimes send you email every day? Slashdot? Rueters? The Florida Fowl Fanciers Association? (OK, I made that one up?.) Are you on any technical email lists? (Many programming lists have 50-100 messages a day, or more, to the list, and the list goes to 1,000?s of people.) These are free now. They won?t be if the ?solution? to spam involves the people who run these paying 1/4 cent per email. Either they will pass those costs on to the people who want the mail ? or they will fold, unable to pay the additional costs.
In the meantime, those of you who want to send 20-30 emails a month, all to friends, will pay higher prices.
But that?s if MS gets their way. I don?t think that will happen.
In order for the pay-to-send model to work, you have to have something that doesn?t happen now. As things stand, when you send an email, it is incredibly easy to put any email address you want in the ?From? field. I can send an email from bill.gates@microsoft.com or president@whitehouse.gov without any trouble. And email programs can?t tell that those are, obviously, forgeries.
If you can?t tell who sent the mail, you can?t charge them for sending it.
If you can tell who sent the mail, then verifying that they aren?t lying to you in the header of the email is easy.
If you throw away all mail that doesn?t have legitimate, verifiable headers, then most of the spam goes away ? and filtering for legitimate messages, as well as filing complaints about illegitimate messages ? gets easy.
The pay-per-email systsems that get talked about all require the same verification. So lets do that first. If, after we can verify who the mail came from, it still seems to be needed to charge for mail, then we can start charging for email then . In the meantime, the goal of any geek that cares about spam should be to verify that the mail that claims to be from XXX is really from XXX, not ABC.
One system that I know is working on this is SPF. Sender Permitted From. I?m not convinced that this is the final solution. I am convinced that they are going the right direction.
I for one am much more annoyed with junk mail than spam. Of course I seem to hardly get any spam or virus mail either.
Spam is a lot easier to separate out than junk mail which is always disguised as a credit card statement or bill.
Spam never gives you paper cuts.
Spam is often more amusing.
On the other hand, junk mail never sets off autoresponder loops.
The ISPs are looking at any and all possibilities. This is one of them, and the one that is probably only being pushed by management.
/both/ Domain Keys AND Caller ID. On top of that, we are likely to start using S/MIME on all external messages. I think when we finally issue a press release, it will be big news, and everyone and their grandmother will join in.
The one that is most likely to get implemented the fastest is SPF. It is already deployed in numerous places, and participating is as easy as putting a TXT record in your domain name. It's so simple AOL is doing it!
But Microsoft's Caller ID and Yahoo's Domain Keys are probably also going to get implemented in 2004.
I know at my major retailer, we are 100% going to deploy SPF, likely this week, and we are 90% likely to do
This idea of charging for email is just one option among many. I'll tell you one thing, it's not a popular one, because it requires legitimate "spammers" to pay to get their email through. Who'd be the gullible ones to implement this first? It's not worth it, and it doesn't solve the most serious problems with email: authenticity and identity.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
I agree. Charge to either receive or send e-mail by the piece, and I'll start using something else. If my ISP forces me to have an Inbox, nothing says I have to empty it. If they ask about it, give them the reason. It's all junk. To reach me, my fax number is ... After dialing, use this PIN to connect to the machine.
The truth shall set you free!
Now this is fsck-ing crazy - the ISP-s pay for the infrastructure and surely it will be federal gov't that will benefit from this so-called tax. And what with Europe, Asia, etc.? If they don't accept US rules will they be blocked or F-16 sent?
You can defy gravity... for a short time
Yes, it would be legitimized. But if every e-mail to you cost a penny, do you really think a spammer who gets a few thousand dollar return on a 1 million recipient spam message will find it economical to continue? After all, a 1 million recpient message would cost $10,000 to send. That would eat most, if not all, of the profit.
But now we're seeing spammers sending message through backdoored windows boxes. Does that mean that the end users who own windows boxes with backdoors will end up paying for all that spam? Sure, you could argue that only people with poorly configured computers will have the problem. Unfortunately, new viruses come out too quickly for all of them to be caught, and even a well configured and maintained computer stands a decent chance of being backdoored for at least a few hours, during which time a bill in the thousands of dollars could be accumulated.
On the plus side, chances are any implementation of this will involve a tracking number on the payment, so it can be verified. (How do you know it was paid for, just because it said it was?) Pros to this, spammers can't send scams without being caught or shut down. Cons to this, I can't send a truly anonymous message to anyone. Again, circumvented by routing through a backdoored PC.
Spam, AKA UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email, remember) is email you don't want and didn't ask for. If you've signed up for it, then by definition it isn't spam. We've been arguing for opt-in for years, the DMA has blocked it all this time.
Great, all you American companies will be paying to send email, and all of us on the other side of the pond will be doing it free of charge.
Keep up the good work America!