Apparently it works well enough.

DenverDon <<<<[[[[

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At least with junk mail (the kind that the postman delivers) there's a significant cost involved in delivering those items. In comparison email is essentially free.

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For anyone interested, legendary British icon among programmers, Verity Stob, has a five part interview with a spammer where much of the mystery is explained:

Stob: Interview with a bulk emailer
Sp@m: the myst.eries xp1ained!!! By Stob
Stob: Why men buy blue pills
Stob: Something for the ladies
Stob: You have opted in

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~ GaySatyr (ABB)

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There's a big difference between spam and direct marketing to your customers over the Internet via e-mail. Charging for the latter could be the final nail in the coffin of companies already working on razor thin margins.

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That wouldn't be spam if they are already customers. Spam is unsolicited messages from someone you don't know, never heard of, and don't want to ... at least that's what I understood.

DenverDon <<<<[[[[

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DenverDon <<<<[[[[

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I'll shut up now.

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~ GaySatyr (ABB)

Edited by - GaySatyr on 4/2/2005 11:36:42 AM

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Once the system is in place an alert service costs practically nothing for them.
It's a nice service that IIRC has prompted me to make a purchase. Usually it doesn't though, so it wouldn't be worthwhile for the shop, if they had to pay even as little a $0.01 per mail.
And no, I wouldn't pay such a meaningless tax for it either.
Where should the money go anyway?

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There's no way that I would have paid a subscription fee to any of these companies in order to recieve their e-mails ands there's no way that they would have been willing to send them to me (and everyone else who has opted-in to their e-mail program) of it cost them a penny a piece (plus whatever additional staff that they would need to hire to deal with administrating this new charge).

I feel the same way about your proposal as I do about watermarking DVD's. You don't punish people who are doing nothing wrong in order to prevent other people from doing something wrong.

You stop spam by punishing the spammers, not by punishing the innocent people.

Taking your argument to the extreme, there are people out there who would say that all gay men should be castrated because some gay men have molested young boys.

Ridiculous, right? It's the exact same concept as you is being proposed except to a different level. Regardless of the level, the concept of punishing the innocent in order to prevent the crime is wrong.

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Include some finite number of emails incorporated with your monthly ISP access fee -- make it a reasonably high number so that no individual is likely to exceed it. Business accounts can have similarly metered arrangements.

Regardless, spammers are not going to quit until it costs them money. Laws -- especially across international borders -- are ineffective.

And, believe me, you are already paying for email -- even free email -- just not on a per message basis. ISP fees and advertising cover the costs. You are also paying dearly for spam in the time it takes you to wade through it. And it's costing the corporate world millions and millions of dollars -- which is passed on to you in higher prices for goods and services.

The real and best solution is for there to be a total revamp of the email system where the origin of the message's sender is essentially guaranteed and where it is impossible to send messages from hijacked systems. But that isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future, either.

~ GaySatyr (ABB)

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But how would you enforce the pay per mail method?

Because of some changes my ISP made to their SMTP service a few months ago, I'm unable to send emails through their SMTP servers with my primary email account, because I have my own domain.
Only return addresses with domains hosted by them are allowed.
Now I've configured my Sendmail installation to send the mails directly to the destination server, bypassing my ISP's SMTP servers.
That way I also get a confirmation of receipt, which I like a lot, since the ISP's SMTP servers were a bit crap around the same time.

And what about webmail hosting?

And again, where should the revenue from this tax go?

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Regardless, unless there were international laws regarding spamming, any laws passed here will just cause the spammers to move somewhere else.

The real answer is for people to ignore all spam so that it is no longer profitable. Unfortunately, for some people, ignoring spam is apparently as impossible as it is for others to ignore message board trolls. As long as the responders exist, the spammers will continue to exist.

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Also, in the taxing scheme how are return receipts to be handled? They are essentially an automatically generated email. Is there and additional cost for them and if so who pays it?

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Apr 1 14:10:15 [snip] relay=my.adultdvdtalk.com. [63.116.134.233], dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent (j31CBUu29538 Message accepted for delivery)

That lets me know that the mail arrived at the server. Whether your spam filter is too aggressive, and flags it as spam, is another matter.
Alternatively I have gotten some helpful error information in the past when a couple of mails didn't reach their destination.

Edited by - Kperv on 4/3/2005 1:29:08 PM

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