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Re: [Asrg] Protecting Legitimate Commercial Email (was Re: ESPC P roposal)

2003-04-30 19:36:41
On Wednesday, Apr 30, 2003, at 11:04 US/Eastern, Kee Hinckley wrote:
At 9:23 AM -0400 4/30/03, mathew wrote:
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.

What are the other resorts?

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.

I'm pretty sure Barry Shein does. Perhaps he could chime in on whether that's just an empty threat, though.

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.

So what you're saying is that providing I defraud you of less than $500, you wouldn't bother to do anything about it?

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.

No, you bounced them because idiot spammers send spam to addresses that they haven't got a confirmed opt-in from.

Made-up e-mail addresses, lying on subscription forms and deliberately subscribing other people's e-mail addresses are not a problem if you're doing confirmed opt-in. And if you're not doing confirmed opt-in, you're a spammer.

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.

Well, those things would be nice, but I don't see that any of them would solve the spam problem, or even improve the situation.


mathew

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