Thursday, November 14, 2002

Spam really is worse than ever. Here's a possible solution. Highlights from a WSJ article on the Spam Business.  I see one good solution: we should all be paying a penny per email message.  First the highlights, then the proposed solution. There is more of it than ever. Unsolicited messages made up 36% of all e-mail on the Internet in August, up from 8% a year ago, estimates Brightmail, an antispam-software maker whose statistics are often cited by legislators who want to outlaw spam. ... From the PC in his tidy two-bedroom Tampa apartment, Chris Connell, the company's computer expert, recently launched a large, promising campaign for Ms. Betterly. "New discovery in spam the easy way!" read the subject line on most of the 15.8 million messages he sent out. They promoted antispam software from Triumvirate Technologies Inc. of Pasadena, Calif.  [oh, the horror] In theory, if enough people bought the software and it worked, Data Resource Consulting could go out of business, but Mr. Connell wasn't worried. ... In the first week of the Triumvirate Technologies campaign, 81 orders came through from 3.5 million messages, a 0.0023% response rate. Still, that generated $1,555 in commissions, and Ms. Betterly was pleased. At that rate, she expected to clear about $25,000 in the end. The proposed solution:  At a penny per email message Ms. Betterley, would have lost $10,000. Now, to whom should all those pennies go?  Why not give it to the ISPs?  They're already collecting the money; and the market would probably drive them to use the extra revenue to compete on service or on price (great, as long as its not price per message, which is what we are regulating.). And if there were, say, a federal law requiring that all mail-server operators charge a penny a message, how would we prevent offshore operators from capturing the market?  How about something like this?   * Some kind of registry associates each (legitimate) spam-sender with a legitimate mail-dispatcher.  * When users receive a message they suspect to be illegitimate, they forward it to their ISP (I'd like to think this puts minimal burden on the net, since it is "in-house") * The ISP (who can also be authorized by users to filter spam) has some legally sanctioned mechanism for pursuing and profiting from apprehending and fining the offender in proportion to the number of offending messages collected.   OK, the last details are not fully worked out.  Is there a solution in something like this?  Is there an alternative? (Follow this thread at Slashdot: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=44950&;cid=4668225 ) comments? [] 9:55:05 AM

© Copyright 2004 Jon Schull. Last update: 1/21/04; 9:26:18 AM.