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Secretary of
State Websites
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In 2004, spam
constituted 75% of
all 2004 email (Nucleus Research, cited in Business Week, February 7,
2005). By 2008, that figure was up to 90%.
(Cisco
Systems Annual Security Report).
Spammers place a huge burden on Internet
Service Providers (ISPs) by forcing them to buy more equipment and hire more staff
to block (when possible) or deliver (when not possible) the ever-growing volume
of spam. And since emailers
aren’t charged per email sent, the cost of all the unwanted, offensive spam is
passed on to consumer and business subscribers – built into monthly access
fees. Unwilling
recipients – you! – are paying for all the spam. This is analogous to receiving unwanted
telemarketing calls on a pay-per-minute cellular telephone.
Spam is almost
always unwanted by recipients, and it often contains highly offensive or
illegal material, such as pornography or advertisements for counterfeit
software. Spam requires significant time
to analyze and delete, because the subject lines are often highly misleading,
which makes it hard to find important email.
The volume of spam can make it prohibitively expensive to use a
pay-by-data-volume means of email access (such as a wireless Palm Pilot) or a
pay-by-the-minute means of email access (such as a telephone line at a
hotel).
Spam is
often used to deliver viruses or spyware or introduce
other harmful agents into recipients’ computers, so never
double-click an attachment you don’t recognize, especially if
there’s a .zlo or .exe in the filename, even if it
appears that Yahoo or Paypal is requesting account
update information. Spam is a means of
perpetuating deceptive, if not illegal, business schemes. Spammers trespass into recipients’ emailboxes (where the spam takes up some of a user’s fixed
storage allocation and could cause important legitimate email to “bounce back”)
and onto recipients’ hard drives (where the spam contributes to fragmenting the
physical hard drive, which can reduce the computers’ performance).
When
utilizing traditional direct marketing through the mail, the sender must pay
for paper, printing, lettershopping, and postage, and
so must use a certain amount of cost/benefit analysis before sending the
advertisements to ensure that the advertisements are not sent to unwilling recipients
or to those who have no or little chance of responding. However, the economics of the spam are such
that after a certain fixed cost to build a website and create an email
advertisement, the variable cost of sending a spam to each additional (and
unwilling) recipient is essentially zero.
Therefore, the spammer has little financial incentive to carefully
screen its database and lists and remove those recipients who opted out, and every financial incentive to blast as many emails
as possible. (As usual, there are always
some leeches in society who take advantage of the status quo for their own
benefit, to the detriment of others.) In
fact, once a spammer acquires an email address, usually through non-legitimate
means, it may take more effort to unsubscribe a recipient than to just keep
spamming the recipient. And because
spammers often sell lists to each other, removing an email address from a
database can have a negative financial impact to a spammer.
The
Internet offers tremendous potential for marketers to deliver precisely targeted and customized
information and offers to consumers who truly want
to receive them, but all too often, spammers abuse the potential of
the technology and instead take advantage of zero-variable-cost nature of email
to blast their unsolicited advertisements at every email address they possibly
can. Let me repeat this point – there is
no financial incentive for a spammer to do any kind of list management that a
traditional (offline) marketer would use.
That’s why men get spammed for breast enlargement pills and women get
spammed for penis enlargement pills; why people with regular plumbing get
spammed for septic tank solutions; why children get spammed with prostitution
ads, etc.
The spam
volume is growing so high – and some of the content is so offensive – that spam is actually threatening the legitimacy of email as a
means for communication. I've sent emails to clients and
potential clients that were deleted, because the recipient thought that they
might have been spam.
Are you as outraged yet as I am?
Personally,
I think that if senders could be forced to pay even a fraction of a penny per
email, the spam problem would disappear almost immediately. Consumers and legitimate marketers can afford
that tiny cost, but it would absolutely kill the spam business. As it is, since there is no variable cost,
even the smallest response rate to a spam can result in big profits for the
spammers.
But since
that isn’t going to happen anytime in the immediate future, in the absence of
an economic reason to stop spamming unwilling consumers, only litigation seems
to make an impact. And the Courts, in California
and other states, have begun ruling against the
spammers.
What You Can Do Now: Technological Solutions
Many ISPs, like Earthlink, have their own anti-spam filters like
Brightmail that get rid of the crap
before you ever get it. There are
corporate-level solutions like
FrontBridge
Technologies. Email service
providers like Yahoo!, Hotmail, and AOL have filters too. And even computer novices can install
programs like
McAfee’s
SpamKiller,
MailFrontier’s
Matador,
CloudMark’s
SpamNet, and
Sunbelt
Software’s I Hate Spam locally on your PC.
SpamCop
is a web-based system that filters your email before you read it, and you can
keep your current email address (except AOL).
SpamArrest is a challenge-response
system that makes the sender of an email – just the first time – click a link
and type in a key word in order to verify that the sender is a real person
and not a bulk-mailer before allowing the email to go through… since spammers
usually forge the sender email address, they won’t ever receive the challenge
and thus won’t be able to make the verification, nor would they have the time
to do so, considering the millions of spams they send out.
You can also click
here for
CAUCE's (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email) view on the problem.
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