John Levine wrote:
To answer John L's question: Pays an ESP, or pays to license mailing
list management or CRM software, or most likely in Amazon's case pays
a small army of DBAs and programmers and marketers and HTML designers
and MTA administrators.
Add it all together and it's a drop in the bucket compared to the
aggregate recipients' costs, despite a great deal of wishful thinking
by ESPs who would like to imagine that their business models are not
dependent on the charity of the world's mail systems.
No sender, legitimate or spammer, pays anything like the full cost of
handling their mail. It's all subsidized by recipients. As I've said
over and over, that's fine for the mail we want.
Manifestly, it's "fine" for the mail we don't want in aggregate too. At
some level of unavoidable spam and/or equipment cost to maintain an
acceptable level, that will remain true. If that utility function changes to
not favor mail, people will just vote with their fingers. As will the
spammers if they start finding that the Next Best Thing gives them
better ROI.
That's pretty much why this email postage stuff is a waste of time. Even
if it were wildly successful, what other part of the net would you want
the spammers to focus their huge resources on instead? Ground up
redesigns based on lots of operational experience often produce amazing
results. The law of unintended consequences runs very deep in this area.
Mike
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