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."
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.
Just because a company pays a spam tax doesn't mean they can force you to download it and read it, it just means they're paying a fee for the privlidge of sending it. Comparing it to normal junk snail mail, advertisers still pay to send that to you, but there's nothing stopping you from hiring a guy to sort your mail for you and throw out all the junk mail before giving it to you. It's the same deal here, you're just hiring your ISP to deliver the extra service of sorting your E-Mail before delivering it too you. Thus, spammers lose the incentive of sending Spam that they're paying money for but is being blocked without anyone seeing it. The only problem would arise with government run ISP's, where the spammers would be paying the government to not deliver their messages. But I see that as similar to the taxation of cigarettes. The govt can put a tax on cigs and then dictate where they can and can't be used.