More on Spam

[KC]

Originally posted by Hooper@May 16 2003, 12:06 PM
i was just thinking.. what would happen if everybody used "ADV" and it became law (and yes, the usa can legislate other countries... at least the majority of them.. and in the end the major bandwidth providers are all based out of countries that have strong ties with the usa.)?

follow me here...

everybody begins using it... eventually all commercial email is getting filtered into your "Bulk" box... this decreases the financial return of bulk mailing substantially but also means that marketers are no longer viewed as criminals. places like "spews" may still exist, but they would no longer have much purpose aside from bitching about "fast money grab" mailers who do not label.

As the value drops until it eventually levels out at some point two things happen.
now that it is a major crime to send advertisements without labeling you will only see the occasionaly fast money grab spammer and complaints suddenly actually carry weight because it's no longer a question of whether you opted in or not, it's a question of whether it was labeled properly (and yes, set up a filter to move all lists you DID opt into into your inbox even though they are labeled as bulk)

Additionally because now the law allows advertisments to be sent mailers no longer have to worry about hosting and software because they can send away without paying for special software to rotate ip's.. special hosts who turn a blind eye.. expensive landing hosts that are only 80% reliable at best. Accordingly the costs of mailing go down.

So in summary, a labeling system will
1) decrease the financial returns of mailing
2) decrease the costs of mailing.
3) eliminate the legal exposure of marketers

California already has such a law on the books. It's had little or no effect.

Maybe if it was a national effort it would be more effective, however I still think it's too difficult to enforce and therefore woulndn't be effective.

I know CJ loves analogies, so I'll throw one more out. And no CJ, it's not about farming.....

Getting spammers to all follow a "code of conduct" would be much harder than getting 100,000+ (a rough guess at the number of spammers nationwide or at least in the world) untethered donkeys to follow you.

Spam will remain a problem until a solution to block all unsolicted email, not just UCE is widely deployed.

It can't be solved with legistlation.. Even if you give spammers the death penalty for getting caught spamming... the spam will still flow! Legistlation isn't the answer.