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June 01, 2003
SPAM
Having some success with the Earthlink SPAMBlocker BETA. You can still let most of your stuff through, you just have to ok it once online. I still personally think that for email to be as efficient (on a marketing side) as snail mail is, there will have to be some sort of optional charge, preferably by individuals setting a certain price to receive email.
At present, it effectively costs spammers nothing to email me, thus, they don't bother to filter their lists in even the most basic of ways. I should get either penis or breast enlargement spam, but probably not both. If they had to pay me $.01 for delivery, they could at least get this right. If they had to pay $.20, which is about the cost of direct mail sent to my physical address, they would get a lot of other things right.
I would guess that most people would decide that their cost is somewhere in between. The main beneficiary of this kind of setup would be honesty. When I go to a website that has information I'm interested in, I often leave a fake email address if I'm required to register. If internet marketing was intelligent, I'd leave a real one. If some marketer has something that readers of TNR and the NME (perhaps a britpop singing Joe Lieberman doll) might be interested, it's in my interest to hear about it.
I'm not optimistic at all about Congress' various proposals to tackle the spam problem, such as the impossible to enforce idea of making spoofing illegal. Only ideas that keep in mind the following sad but true (yet made up) response to the Onion's What Do You Think will have any chance of working:
- Q: Congress is exploring ways to combat the problem of "spam," the wave of junk e-mail that has clogged e-mail systems and cost U.S. businesses billions. What do you think?
"Even more disturbing than this never-ending torrent of junk e-mail is the fact that, apparently, they must actually work once in a while." -- Chris Kingery, Systems Analyst
Posted by Chris at June 1, 2003 07:28 PM
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