The Economics of Spam

How much are people making by mailbombing us all with ads for Viagra and growth tonic and the like? Enough to ensure that you'll never be far from your next spam.

Link via Geek Press.

Comments

[Brian]

That article reminds me of the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror Short "Attack of the 50-Foot Eyesores"...the one where people realize the only way to get the giant advertisements to stop attacking is to ignore them, but there's that one asshole (Homer, of course) who JUST CAN'T HELP IT...

[The Mountain Goat]

I've often wished the ISPs would form a coalition where each e-mail is accompanied by a penny. Send e-mail to 30 recipients, it costs 30?. But get 31 e-mails and be ahead one cent.

Next, let users set a maximum limit on daily outgoing e-mails. A hacked account is of little value to a spammer if he can only spam 40 addresses a day.

I imagine that at first, spammers would end up paying to reach us, and we'd earn a few bucks for our deleting efforts, but that this would lead to an equilibrium defined by how much e-mail we send, rather than how much we get.

And I bet a penny or two is all it would take to stop most spam.

[Lonewacko]

Except that spammers send email from open relays. Look at the headers to an email message, and you can see the intermediate steps; it's not just a point-to-point message. So, the intermediate steps would have to be in on the pay-per-email in some way.

[The Mountain Goat]

Lone Wacko, I agree. However, my ISP would not forward nor deliver without that penny attached. The goal is to make spammers pay for sending. Bypassing an onramp will only get them as far as the next ISP or server owner. Servers along the way detecting a message without the penny can save bandwidth and simply delete the message. The spam does not reach the mailbox without the penny.

[Neb Okla]

Mountain Goat. We have a system like this. It's called the Postal Service. Companies spend a fortune every year shoveling shit into my mailbox, and I spend a lot of time sorting it for recycling or whatever. Sometimes just pitching it.

Same problem though - just shifting the troublemakers from pyramid scheme dipshits to corporate marketing dipshits.

I've heard of one ISP that is going to use a challenge/response method to block spammers. Essentially, every email they recieve will generate an email back to the sender asking them to validate their identity (and that they are indeed reachable via the return address). Once the person responds, they can continue to send email like normal.

I guess that sounds ok...

until half of the ISP's in the world start doing it. And then I'll be getting flood from half of the people in the world with ISP's who have challenge-response email, and Spam from the remaining mail servers in Asia.

Actually, I'm using a program called SpamPal right now. It lets you block email from Asia. Pretty cool - it cut my Spam by at least 95% (if you check the headers, most of the open relays are in Asia).

My favorite method is to set everyone up with a digital ID (you can get a free one from http://www.thawte.com - or you can pay $15 a year for one from versisign). The ID can be used with email clients that support S/MIME (Outlook, Outlook Express, Lotus Notes, Netscape, etc.). It's cool to have because it prevents Hotmail from tacking advertisements to my emails (it would ruin the digital signature). And it also prevents Yahoo-style tricks such as censoring words in my emails (midreview!).

Ultimately, if everyone had a unique digital ID then I could only accept emails from people with digital ID's.

Of course, people wouldn't like losing anonymity... but you'd gain encryption!

...not that any of you are truly anonymous online anyway.

[L. Spooner]

Talking about the Post Office . . . pretty soon that penny becomes 3, and then a nickel, and then a dime, and so on.

There's a well-known law that says, EVERYTHING IN NATURE GROWS. Salesmen, Peddlers, your midriff, governments -- they're all part of nature.

And if you don't believe it, ask a libertarian what the tax rate started out as, back in 1913.

[The Mountain Goat]

...only me penny goes to the recipient, not the middle man! With the Post Office, we don't get paid to remove junk mail from our snail mail box, and the Post Office gets paid to put it in there. (Also, the Post Office gives discounts to junk mailers: just check how little postage they put on those envelopes!)

With my scheme, the users get paid to sift spam, the ISPs incentive is the opposite of the Post Office's, and it is an industry solution, not a government tax.

[Anonymous]

Maybe we misunderstood you. Goat. Are you saying we actually get an electronic CREDIT everytime we kill a piece of spam?

[Neb Okla]

...maybe if Spammers paid me $10 per email - then I'd look at their weight loss pills or whatever. Not that I need to lose any weight.

[american home loans]

EMAIL: [e-mail]
IP: 62.213.67.122
URL:
DATE: 02/01/2004 07:28:37
Gratitude is born in hearts that take time to count up past mercies.

[Canman]

I would make it a 10 cent deposit. You could waive it for normal email and keep each dime for spam and other unwanted email.