At 10:34 PM -0400 4/30/03, mathew wrote:
No, that isn't how they do it. Court suits are a last resort.
What are the other resorts?
Negotiation.
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.
I think it was Barry who told me it wasn't worth it--but I'm *quite*
sure he can speak for himself on the issue :-).
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?
Not if the cost of recovering it is greater than $500. This isn't
abstract, it's happened to me personally. I had a plumber walk off
with $6000 of my money, skip out on the court dates, and skip out on
the bankruptcy hearing. We put a trace on him for a while, but
eventually we gave up. Getting the money back costs too much.
Modern society doesn't work because people will sue you at the drop
of the hat if you do something wrong. It works because people are
basically honest.
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.
I used to think confirmed opt-in was the answer. I'm no longer so
sure. End users are not as smart as I thought they were. (And I
didn't think they were very smart from the get go.) But there's
certainly no point in labeling 90% of the emailing community spammers
just because they don't agree with you on how to verify an address.
You aren't going to get very far in negotiations that way.
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.
That's because you've already decided that everyone who doesn't
believe what you believe is evil. You've got no where to go when it
comes to trust. On the bright side, you are being consistent.
That's perfectly in line with assuming that people behave because
they are afraid that otherwise they'll get sued.
--
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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