On Thu, 12 Feb 2004, Dan Kolis wrote:
Dan says:
Well, I have never gotten an unsolicited paper item for Viagra, but have
gotten hundreds of electronic ones. There is a distinction between
unsolicited communications, direct marketing, and spam. Its subtle and
creates (in the US) first amendment rights issues that are non-trivial.
But, 100M email mass solicitation at $0.001 each is $100K, which is a medium
good houseworth of dollar value here. I think it would annihlate the worst
of mass spam.
If you could charge it to the abusers, it might. The problem, as I pointed
out, is that you cannot charge it to the abusers. You can only charge the
innocent.
I think whoever thought up the idea should be identified as a pretty sharp
cookie. Its just slices through so many thorny issues with few downsides.
They are a sharp cookie, alright. Wish I had thought of it. Except, that
it won't have any impact on spam, but will make the person collecting fee
commissions very rich. Hmm. Could it possibly be a purely economic
motiviation by a certain group? Nah.
Of course, if absolutely no one responded to spam the incentive wouldn't be
there to send it. So maybe we just need more time for young people .... Hey!
There is a guy in Nigeria who wants to give me two million dollars. Gotta go!
This is another myth. The worst of the worst spam isn't responded to.
I've tried a number of times to purchase Viagra from spammers, assuming
that since Viagra is a prescription drug, and I don't have a prescription,
I could complain to the authorities. So far, while I've seen some
reasonably complete-looking websites, no one has even charged my credit
card--a debit card with very little money in the account, but enough to
cover the Viagra. Why send the spam if you aren't go to charge the credit
card? It wasn't even the case that they tried rip off the money, and send
nothing... For spammers, they are pretty honest, except for the lying
part.
I also tried responding immediately to 20 of the Nigeria scam spams. No
one has tried to solicit personal information, and the one (and only)
response I did get just said the address was forged. So what's up when
even the scams aren't really the scams they appear to be?
Now we have statistics that the top 95 genuine spammers are mostly in
compliance, yet the junk in my emailbox is not even partially in
compliance. How do that work out?
--Dean