At 9:23 AM -0400 4/30/03, mathew wrote:
On Monday, Apr 28, 2003, at 14:48 US/Eastern, Hallam-Baker, Phillip wrote:
I think you are being too definitive about the ESPC people.
In particular one of their issues is that there is no way they have at
present to tell whether a list a customer gives them is genuinely 'opt-in'
or not.
Sure there is. Make the provider sign a contract stating that the
list is genuinely a list of people who have opted in to receive
e-mail from the appropriate organization(s). If they turn out to
have lied, it's fraud and breach of contract, and you sue them for
damages to your business reputation. After you win a few hundred
thousand dollars a couple of times, end of problem--nobody's going
to risk those kinds of damages to sell you a $1,000 database of
e-mail addresses. That's how legitimate businesses do it.
No, that isn't how they do it. Court suits are a last resort. When
you've got a customer paying you a couple $100/month to run a list,
you aren't going to be able to get that kind of damages. Certainly
not enough to cover your court costs. If it were that easy, ISPs
would do it when their customers spam. They don't. They don't even
do the "We'll charge your credit card $500 if you spam" thing. Why?
Because the customer simply disputes the charge, and then you're off
to court to try and get $500. You can't win that game.
Furthermore, we're dealing with a market in which there is heavy
churn (people get ISP accounts that someone else already had) and
heavy forgery on the part of the recipients (Want that free coupon,
but don't want to pay with your email address? Make up one!). We've
seen stats that as many as a third of the people entering email
addresses in subscription forms are lying. Never mind that there are
people who search out spamtrap addresses and deliberately subscribe
them to lists they don't like. Somewhere.com didn't bounce ten
million messages last year because bulkmailers lie. We bounced them
because people like you and I lied to bulkmailers.
In that market, how do you prove that the list owner is at fault?
About all you have to go on is whether or not there is a pattern of
misbehavior.
What we need in this system is some way of restoring trust. Trust by
a recipient that they can safely unsubscribe. Trust by a bulkmailer
that the list owner has followed best practices. Trust by the list
owner that the recipients haven't lied. There's a circle there, and
it's broken.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.messagefire.com/ Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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