On Apr 22, 2004, at 11:05, Tom Thomson wrote:
Surely the argument is that if the cost of sending spam goes up to
such a
level that sending spam ceases to be profitable, then no-one will do
it any
more?
I don't fully believe this argument myself, or at least I don't
believe it
can be achieved by e-postage, for a number of reasons.
Well, look at it this way: The *worst possible case* is that e-postage
completely fails to make any dent in the amount of spam I receive, but
I now get (say) 5 cents per spam in e-postage.
Looking at this month's statistics, I'd be getting $20 a month free
money from the spammers. That's enough to pay for a free Internet
connection. Heck, if I make my postage 10 cents, they'll be buying me a
free cable modem connection. Now, that's a worst case I'm prepared to
live with!
First, we still see junk mail on paper. Something like 65% of my
paper mail
is junk. So the charge for paper mail hasn't eliminated spam.
Do you get 50 pieces of paper junk mail every day? I don't. Maybe
e-postage won't eliminate spam, but I'll settle for spam dropping in
volume by a factor of 10 as a worthy start.
Second, who pays the charge? If a spammer "owns" a bunch of zombie
machines
scattered round the world, they pay the email charge - he doesn't. So
it's
not much of a deterrent to him.
On the other hand, he's now committing actual theft from thousands of
people, which may gain the interest of law enforcement.
Third, there's one born every minute. The spammer can recruit people as
spam-mailers, people who believe they will make money by working for
him and
won't stop sending spam on his behalf until they have lost a packet
(some
won't even stop until they've gone bankrupt). They make the losses, he
makes the profits.
Hey, if a spammer can find enough suckers to buy me free Internet, I'm
not complaining.
So we don't know how high we have to set the price to get spam down to
a
"reasonable" level, and setting the price too high is as bad as the
spam -
my email is just as unusable if no-one can afford to email me as it is
if I
have to spend too much time filtering out the spam.
You mean no-one can afford to *risk* e-mailing you and *risk* having
you cash the postage, right? Because you don't *have* to cash the
e-postage...
Maybe over time we can find the right pricing level, if there is one,
but maybe there isn't a right pricing level to find.
Well, there's only one way to find out, because we sure as hell can't
trust the spammers to tell us.
mathew
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