Actually, it's quite possible to eliminate ALL advertising email, but not
with the free lunch economic model. If there was any real cost up front for
sending email, then the entire system would change. The most obvious change
would be that the bulk spammers would not reach you at all, and instantly.
You are advocating a more extreme position, however. In spite of the greater
email visibility of the spammers, there are lots of legitimate businesses
using the Web, too, and many of them would be willing to pay for your
attention. Given my choices, I'd actually set the charges for my attention
at a rather high level, but that's because I value my time quite a bit and
would insist that any advertiser who wants to reach me had better agree to
that value. But if you really want to eliminate ALL advertising, then you'd
need to set the rate quite high--probably high enough to pay for someone to
check your email for you.
(I'd also want the option to allow some people to use a white list at very
low rates--or I'd even pay to receive their email as long as they agreed to
use an email system that would reliably prevent sender falsification.)
Actually, I'm rehashing an old position that I introduced when I first
visited this mailing list (and before I was driven off by the volume and my
lack of time). However, I see that nothing seems to have changed in my
absence. The largest bulk of the discussion is about how to escalate the war
by increasing the technical complexity of using email. The next largest bulk
is hoping for the government to ride to the rescue with laws that will
probably be much worse than the disease--power always gets abused. And
almost no consideration of the underlying cause: There is NO free lunch. If
the spammers had to pay for their lunch, they would have NO appetite.
J C Lawrence wrote:
On Sun, 27 Apr 2003 21:15:39 -0400
Margaret Olson <Olson> wrote:
You consent to a mailing because you expect certain content. If the
content isn't what you expected, isn't it spam? Don't you want to
hold the marketer responsible?
I would be content if I could simply state to the universe, "Do not
send me mail which attempts to market to me," and have reasonable
expectation of that election being respected. That simple: No
marketing mail, no exceptions, no discussion, no appeal.
Sadly, that's not possible.