At 14:37 -0500 3/7/03, Keith Moore wrote:
> >> A spammer wishing to
>> send out hundreds of thousands of messages would end up paying hundreds
>> dollars each time.
>
>snail mail spammers routinely pay considerably larger sums. why wouldn't
>they do this for email?
I believe the snail mail adverts are generally targeted toward some
groups and not others. They are geography-bounded. And the response
rates are higher.
mostly true. but it's still annoying, and there's still a lot of it. frankly
I don't see the point in raising the cost of spam if the only result is to
change who is doing the spamming. especially if it makes it more expensive
for someone to send me mail that I want to receive as a side-effect.
I wrote separately that just raising the cost floor doesn't help because all
senders' costs increase (yours and mine included).
The core economic argument is not that difficult... if it returns more than
it costs, the activity occurs.
Spamming is a little different, though, in this way... the senders
of the spams are often service bureaus, not principals. Thus if it is
profitable to operate a spam service bureau (selling spamming
services) then service bureaus will continue to send spams. The
success rate
for the product itself is removed from the discussion. There are lots
of suckers out there who want to get rich on the Internet, they don't
know each other, and there is no entry barrier for a new spamming
service provider, so there's not a lot of direct feedback about
success/failure rates, and thus little to dissuade new customers for
the spammers.
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