Counting The Cost Of Spam 181
Bender Unit 22 writes: "According to a study by the EU Commission, spam costs over 10 billion euro (1 euro is about 0,92$) a year worldwide. The study's analysis of e-mail marketing concentrates on the US market. The commision have made a proposal to update the 'directive on data protection and privacy' in the telecommunications sector. This proposal favours the opt-in approach. Today, opt-ins are required in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Italy and Germany."
Re:Much More Than That... (Score:1)
You should have carried your back of hand calculations one step furthure: $300,000 * 365 = $109,500,000
since when does it cost money to send email? (Score:1)
Re:Much More Than That... (Score:1)
stupid me! note to self: always preview...
You should have carried your back of hand calculations one step furthure: $300,000 * 365 = $109,500,000 less then 10e9. (or is it a british billion 10e12?) Your estimate is off by 100 times. As my math prof once said: "that is a lot of wiggle room."
Re:since when does it cost money to send email? (Score:1)
Re:anti-UCE (Score:1)
Re:Realworld spam is much worse! (Score:1)
Postal mail advertisers actually pay for the delivery and other expenses incurred by third parties.
Re:Tell that to the people who pay for bandwidth! (Score:1)
Spam doesn't compare in any way to legit TV or print advertising. It would - only if it were possible for a spam company to sneakily inject their adverts into a TV station's programming without paying that TV station for carrying the adverts.
Your argument is therefore utterly bogus.
Re:since when does it cost money to send email? (Score:1)
Internet subscribers world-wide are unwittingly paying an estimated euro 10 billion a year in connection costs just to receive "junk" e-mails.
Of course it might just be 1 cent for each user in connection time, but there's a lot of users, and a lot of spam.
Not all have a flat-rate internet connection yet.
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Re:Spam-hating has gone out of style (Score:1)
And where did you get the notion that spam funds bandwidth?
Re:Why Spam? (Score:1)
Re:since when does it cost money to send email? (Score:1)
If you have Unix and an Internet connection. (If you have Internet, you almost certainly connect Unix to it) your costs are reduced. Still even if the bulk rate for Internet is $2.00 - $5.00 per GByte (this may be a bit high today) and each Spam eats say 5kB (minimalist Spam) 1Million is going to take 5GB costing between $10.00 and $25.00!
No big deal you say? Allright, consider the dial-up user who uses Windoze and an "easy mailer" and downloads *all* mail at an average speed of perhaps 4kB/s. Maybe 80% still use the phone for "Internet" service and typical cost is about $0.01/min for a local call. (remember most people don't live in N. America in the country!) It is going to take 80% of the Million victims 278 hours to download. That brings the phone cost to $166.67 and the total cost upto $191.67 for a very simple spam. Don't forget some people (particular cablemodem users) pay upto 100x cost. So if just 5% are connected that way, the cost easily shoots past $200.00/Spam!
Conclusion: If everyone received ten spams a day, the estimated cost would be $150Million per year. The EU is very conservative on their estimate. I guess I must get alot more than average and the EU calculations are based on 4 - 5 minimal spams per week. Just wait for 10M "porno previews", junk binaries/Outlook attachments and promotional pictures. When the problem exceeds $1Billion/year, politicians will get off their arses, even in America!
Commercial versus Non-commercial speech (Score:1)
Re:Spam-hating has gone out of style (Score:1)
I have to agree that banner ads are the commercials of the internet (while I would include legit, closed loop [spamcop.net] advertisement emails or newsletters).
Spam (UCE), is more analagous to driving down the street with a 6 meter amplifier broadcasting your commercial on a popular channel, overpowering the legit station on that channnel. Or perhaps renting lots of tapes at Blockbuster/Hollywood/local video rental store and taping your commercial over parts of the movie.
I know how to cost them real money (Score:1)
pay goto.com per click thru
some pay over $3 per click
search for bulk e mail on goto.com
and you will see for your self
or follow the limk in my sig. for more info
deception (Score:2)
Oh yeah, and anyone who gets a fill-in-the-blanks spam letter to send out and gives their name as "fsdfk" should be shot in the head just on principle.
Re:A little inflated? (Score:1)
Re:My suggestion: (Score:1)
you will owe us $10000 (adjust the currency symbol and amount as needed) per incident.
Courts would rule this unreasonable and strike it down.
If you fail to pay, we WILL destroy your credit rating,
Non-payment to one company will not destroy your credit.
we WILL garnish your pay,
Employers only listen to courts and the IRS to do this.
we WILL charge you 5% interest per month
That would put you over 22% per year, which is roughly the unofficial limit for credit. Again, courts would strike it down as unreasonable.
and we WILL make your physical address and name public on our 'Spammers Hall of Shame' page.
Said ISP would get sued (and in some parts of the country the plantiff would win) for slander.
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Unfortunately, spam does work. (Score:1)
There are a couple of flaws in your commentary. First, an ISP (in the US) can terminate a user's service for any reason, so the addition of "ADV:" would not create a legal challenge to this. Second, spam does have a much higher response rate than you are estimating. It's probably about equal to that of a postal bulk mailing, which is 2%. It's enough of a response to motivate spam.
It essentially comes down to the fact that, in the case of most spam runs, there is a percentage of business leads generated. This is why spam will not go away of its own accord.
On the "penalties" note, most spammers just move from ISP to ISP. Charging them an administrative fee for spamming doesn't work, the spammers typically dispute the credit card charges. I saw the dispute paperwork for one spammer at an ISP I worked at and there were 10 charges from 10 ISPs in a 30 day period and the guy was disputing all of them. Without a signature, the complainant always wins.
maru
Re:anti-UCE (Score:1)
If you are selling a product on the internet, you don't need banner ads. You are already selling the product to make money, duh!
Corporate websites make money from their product. There's where the money comes from to establish their informational websites.
Everyone else, like me, create pages with information because they have something to share, and want to do so.
Spam and banner ads are unneeded. Get over it. I seem to recall a very nice internet surviving without all that crap before 1994. And ya know what? It was a better place.
The good, bad, and the ugly! (Score:2)
There is a problem with this survey. You have the SPA saying that piracy costs $$$billions in sales. You have the RIAA saying that MP3 and Napster costs $$$billions in sales. You have the MPAA claiming that DeCSS costs them $$$billions because everyone is copying DVDs and putting them online. They claim that each copy means a sale lost, but we know that many of the copies would not translate into sales/losses. How did the EU study calculate losses?
Re:Spam-hating has gone out of style (Score:1)
Just a point of clarification: before targeted, useful commercial e-mail became the norm, the Internet was a curiosity that was visited upon by tens of thousands of academics and professionals with mainframe accounts. Today, there are millions of people on the Internet. It is ridiculous to suggest that the bandwidth required to sustain those millions could be funded using the same sources as when the Internet was an obscure network that 99.99% of the population had never even heard of.
Re:Spam-hating has gone out of style (Score:4)
Do you really think that spam is necessary, a benefit, one of the 'costs of doing business'? I certainly don't. Spam can be generated by any sixth-grade kid with a TRS-80. It is not the equivalent of advertising, and it is not a 'necessary evil'.
It's time that people either learn to accept reality, or get off the Internet.
Well, that settles it: Flamebait. I'm giving up the chance to mod you down because I want to respond to this, even though I know I am being goaded. It's fun to take this a point at a time.
Spam is not a derogatory term, or you have never heard of a derogatory term. The reference to Monty Python is actually an attempt to disarm the agony of spam with humor. Hubris, if you will. The term "junk mail" is derogatory, however.
Spam is not commercials of the internet. Banner Ads are. Spam is an abuse of the system, taking advantage of a service that has no limits, until people are forced to put limits on the system, making everyone else suffer due to the actions of a few (it's been that way ever since 4th grade gym class).
The basic principles of the free market are not anarchy. There is a code, and spammers violate it.
You talk like the government should not tell businesses how to conduct themselves. The line about the govt being offensive indicates that your relationship with reality is tenuous at best. Hell, I gotta quote it:
The notion that the government should step in and place restrictions on how business should be run is offensive.
That is the governments job. It may be offensive to spammers, but its not nearly as offensive as some internet practices.
Banning Spam != Repealing the First Amendment.
heh, now its my duty to participate in the 'advertising process". I'm sorry, can you contain your spittle as you type this stuff? It is just too too funny.
...anti-spammers are anti-business
...spam is the lifeblood of America
...spam is one of the capitalist principles of a free market
...spam-hating was a fad
...a tiny minority of Americans want to ban spam
...anti-spammers are communists
Thanks. Even though I have been had, I feel like I have been had by one of the best, guy. You really take the cake. What a brilliant exercise in sarcasm!
Thanks for the laugh. It may be on me, but hopefully you have pre-empted any posters who even remotely believe any of the nonsense You posted.
Spam the real problem (Score:2)
As if... (Score:3)
I have to believe that most all of the numbers that are floating around out there are based on hypotheticals and conjecture (as well as a little hopefulness [is that a word?] to sway people into thinking that the figure has some sort of real significance).
Or maybe ma bell [att.net] was telling the truth [farcaster.com]
C.O.D. (Score:1)
My time is not free for other people to waste!
Big Improvement (Score:1)
Put it another way... (Score:2)
All these jackoff corporations going after websites for IP infringement, when in reality they're probably losing more money from spam.
Re:Why Spam? (Score:2)
How's that for "getting real?" I live in the bay area - the number of companies that have national scope that could spam me and all the local companies that could spam me would number in the millions. If only 500,000 sent spam once a month,
that would be over 16,000 emails a day. If they only sent it once a year, that's still over 1300 a day. You want that?????? Is spam still free and doesn't cost you much now? Can you effectivly just hit delete anymore?
Let's go further and say that you have to use a modem due to the fact that DSL / cablemodems / etc are not available to you. Let's say that you are lucky and get about a 4K per second download rate.
Just downloading SPAM would take 1.1 HOURS a day! Is spam still "just a little anoying" anymore?
Unless we as a society really start getting aggressive about spam, this will be a reality. Penalties NEED to include jail time. That's the ONLY thing that will stop spam.
Okay, maybe I'm dense... (Score:3)
I'm trying to figure out what sort of loopholes companies like Doubleclick can make use of to qualify a potential spam recipient as having "opted in" for the "service." IANAL, so I'm going to show a certain amount of ignorance; can such companies make "opting in" a requirement of visitors to a site featuring their banner ads? Or would they have to wait for someone to actually click on the banner before they could say "See, he's interested, let's send him tons of UCE!"
Any attorneys out there who might care to tackle this question? At least as it might relate to current or proposed US or Canadian law?
Make it Double Opt-in (Score:2)
I tried to convince my last job that people on our mailing list had to "double-opt-in" to be on our mailing list, but the boss said it was "too complicated for users". I have since left that job, bleh.
Re:Put it another way... (Score:2)
As much as I agree (Score:2)
But you'll be facing a serious collection problem.
Not quite (Score:2)
First of all, I don't know that there is a commercial free speech to receive business solicitations in my home. It's a little different in outdoor ads, but when it comes to my home, I can hardly believe there is a "free speech" right for businesses to enter my home and put ads everywhere. And yes, receiving spam is the equivalent. This happens already with snail mail, but that doesn't mean it is so because it is constitutionally guaranteed.
Even if there were a business right to spam, there is the issue of consumer's right to privacy, which I believe is also consitutionally guaranteed. Does that matter? Apparently it doesn't, but it should.
Really, the issue is about what is more important: consumer rights or business rights. I argue that consumer's right to not be bombarded with ads at home outweighs the rights of business to spam me. If you are about to say that it is important for businesses to thrive, which in the end benefits consumers anyway, then great, because it leads to my next point...
Spam is completely anti-business. It is in the nature of spam that any idiot can bulk email millions for almost no cost. If it is not regulated, it will spiral beyond control, because even more idiots will use it. For many people this is the case already. Without government control, it will get worse, and email runs the risk of becoming useless due to extremely low signal/noise ratio.
Unfortunately, none of this really matters, because the people that really cause a problem with spam are the aforementioned idiots that don't care what laws are passed. Without secure mail and authentication, I'm afraid spam is here to stay.
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Re:"ADV: " should be mandatory!!! (Score:5)
Re:"ADV: " should be mandatory!!! (Score:2)
Why should we have the entire network paying to transmit millions of copies of messages if the entire point of this is to let everyone delete them? Why bother?
Re:Easy solution (Score:2)
Not at all. Dreamhost [dreamhost.com] requires every new customer to fax a photocopy of the credit card. Is it a pain? Yes. Is it a bad idea? Not at all!
Another idea is that ISPs could refuse to take credit cards that are less than 2 months old.
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Re:What's wrong with spam???? (Score:2)
No problem. As long as the majority of countries have anti-spam regulation, the rest of the world will blackhole the spam-originating countries untill they acquire a clue and stamp out spam.
Re:As if... (Score:2)
If someone likes to do the math, please do.
One thing I know: Spamming was expensive enough for an ISP that hosted a non-profit organization I work for so that they said that "if you get more spam now, we have to remove you." For me, it's not really the money, it's information pollution.
Moderator must be on crack (Score:2)
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Re:Easy solution (Score:2)
Not at all. Dreamhost requires every new customer to fax a photocopy of the credit card. Is it a pain? Yes. Is it a bad idea? Not at all!
Which proves that it is legitimate, physically stolen, or the person has a copy of Gimp or Photoshop.
Re:My suggestion: (Score:2)
Re:Why Spam? (Score:2)
If a business cannot scale beyond the county that they're in, say because they're a construction company and can't reasonably take a contract to build a skyscraper thousands of miles away.. then why would they spam?
My post said that most local businesses and a lot of national business aren't of the nature where adveritising on the national scale doesn't make sense. When was the last time you saw a superbowl ad for a plumber? Or a local auction house? Or a company that makes the little rubber feet that go onto electronic items so they don't scratch your furniture? Or for the maker of an IC?
Not everyone has a potential market that big, hence to think that a large portion of business will ever start doing it is crazy.
I don't like spam as much as the next guy, but to think that you'll ever get thousands a day? Get real.
Easy solution (Score:3)
1. All ISPs need to really check the validity of a credit card before authorizing the new customer. If it takes two days to do this, so what? No one needs to get an email account right away at 2am. I suggest a new law that requires credit card companies to provide some method that can absolutely determine whether a credit card is valid, and that ISPs are required to use this service.
2. All ISPs need to charge a user's credit card some hefty fine if the account is used to send spam. Just terminating the account is not enough. I fine must be levied.
3. ISPs must be held legally liable for obvious security holes, such as open SMTP relays. If I own a couple of pit bulls and I accidentally leave my front gate open and the dogs attack someone, I'm responsible, regardless of how that gate got open. If I can prove that someone else maliciously opened the gate, then he's the one in trouble, not me. But that burden of proof lies on me. The same standard should be applied to ISPs.
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Re:Why Spam? (Score:3)
You have a right to talk, print up things, post a webpage, etc, and I have a right to voluntarily choose to go listen. That is the extent of free speech protection guaranteed by the first amendment as I see it. The government cannot interfere with your ability to make protected free speech or my ability to listen to you make it in whatever form you are making it.
However, I have a similar right to NOT listen. You cannot take away that right any more than the government can. Therefore, it is perfectly OK for you to set up a web page about your product or your political campaign but not for you send me email.
In a similar vein, it is only ok for political and other solicitors to come to my house because I have explicitly agreed to let them by not posting no tresspassing/no soliciting signs. I could, and could tell them to get off my land whenever they appeared, and that would be the opt-out answer to that problem. Some people do that. But they have no inherent right to make you listen to them by wandering onto your property. They can stand somewhere and you can go talk to them, or you can agree to let them come talk to you either explicitly or implicitly, but that's about it.
Missing the point (Score:2)
When you get junk mail via snail mail, sure, you have to sort through it and throw out the ads. But that's not where the money is lost with spam. Junk snail mailers pay the post office to send their spam. The infrastructure of the mail system is not threatened because people are paying to advertise. Banner ads can clutter a site, but the owner of the site is getting paid. It's a symbiotic relationship.
Spammers Dont Pay Their Share For the Internet Infrastructure Used. Spammers usually sign up for a dialup account meant for residential use, spam all night, and get their accounts shut off the next day. Often they signed up with a fake credit card number, but by the time the ISP tries to verify it the next morning it's too late. The meatspace equivalent of spam would be a bulk snail mailer forging stamps and putting their bulk mail in the box without paying the postage.
Sure getting advertisements from JC Penney once a week is annoying. But JC Penney pays for their own mail servers and will let you unsubscribe. The real problem is Joe Schmoe entrepreneur who sees a quick buck by setting up some sort of scam and getting "free postage" to send out their advertisements with no legitimate contact info and no way to be removed from their list.
Think, people!
Re:First stupid question! (Score:2)
So basically... (Score:2)
Re:Why Spam? (Score:2)
Re:Missing the point (Score:2)
Re:Why Spam? (Score:2)
Hardly. Shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is a content restriction. Method restrictions are different.
Suppose I go buy a massive PA system and set it up outside your house. Then I and some pals start shouting about our great new MLM scheme. Around the clock. For days.
If you call the cops, they will come by and ask me to stop. If I don't, they'll arrest me pronto. This would even apply if I was making political speeches or reading poetry. Why doesn't the constitution protect me? Because the cops are rightly suppressing a public nuisance. The content is entirely irrelevant; it's all about the method.
So as the original poster wrote, "Free speech means that you can say whatever you want, not that you can say it however you want." If you think it should be otherwise, let me know where you live so I can drop by and tatoo my messages on your forehead.
Re:Why Spam? (Score:2)
True, but irrelevant. Spam is cheap, and cost shifting makes it even cheaper. I get two or three spams a day for businesses in Argentina; I've never even been to Argentina. Why? Because it's more expensive to carefully target your email than it is to just send out a few million extra and live with the decreased response rate.
I don't like spam as much as the next guy, but to think that you'll ever get thousands a day? Get real.
Ten years ago, I got zero. Five years ago, I got one or two. Today, I get maybe 30 a day, despite extensive technological and social measures to reduce spam. Since you seem to have the answers, care to tell me what the maximum number I'll get is? Don't forget to include the fact that only a small percentage of potential internet users are currently on the net.
You're right that it won't be thousands a day, because I'll abandon email entirely at that point. But Moore's law [tuxedo.org] makes spamming ever cheaper and Metcalfe's law [smsu.edu] makes it ever more useful. Pretending that spamming won't get worse is just sticking your head in the sand.
Moderate this one up! (Score:2)
Whenever you need to give out your email-address (and it needs to be a real working address), you just create a new one at Sneakemail.
You should only use each sneakemail address for one service/site/whatever. Why, you ask?
Well, if you later gets spam on that address (which you only have given to the site "http://wesellsyouraddresstospammers.com" then you will know that either they have sent spam to you, or some spammer in some way have bought your address from that company. After telling that company how much you disgust them, you can just delete the address and they have a fake address.
Together with Spamcop [spamcop.net] you are ready to fight the spammers!
Greetings Joergen
Re:Unfortunately, spam does work. (Score:2)
you are estimating. It's probably about equal to that of a postal bulk mailing, which is 2%
Proof please?
I know a LOT of people who use the internet - most of them are "average" users.
_NONE_ of them (as in ZERO) have ever responded to spam.
Ever.
I have no formal studies, but that's enough to convince me that your 2% is just hot air.
So, please provide a link to some studies to back up your claim.
Re:This gets posted to every spam story, but... (Score:2)
Trying to control any mentions of anything remotely related to your trademark is not reasonable. You have the right to prevent others from using it to represent their products. That is all. Slashdot does not sell meat products, and therefore Hormel has no justification in complaining.
Attention Moron (Score:2)
If you knew anything about how this site works, you'd know that it's impossible to moderate in a thread once you've posted in it.
That means you can't moderate yourself up.
==Shoeboy
Re:Why Spam? (Score:3)
Spam is not a form of speech, it's a method of speech. Free speech means that you can say whatever you want, not that you can say it however you want.
Laws on SPAM (Score:4)
Please! No spamming the birds. The Linux Pimp [thelinuxpimp.com]
Re:Why Spam? (Score:4)
There are about 5.7 million businesses [sba.gov] in the US. Now assume that only 1% of those decide to send out spam, and that they send out only one spam per year. That's still 156 messages in your mailbox daily, on average. Some days you might get more.
Given how cheap it is to send out spam, it's very likely that more than 1% of businesses would partake, and also unlikely they would limit themselves to 1 message a year.
Spam is only merely an inconvience as long as the companies that partake are kept underground. If spam is legimized, you can be sure it will be a severe problem.
OK, spam costs money because... (Score:2)
In order:
- Spam email goes through an outgoing mail server. Spammer has most likely paid for server time, so it's not that big.
- Repeat process for several servers, depending on where the message is going. Spammer is no longer paying for server time or transmission costs...but somebody somewhere is.
- End user receives message through incoming mail server. End user is paying for service, and getting that spam email costs him money. You pay for the service that receives your mail, you pay for the time you spend online checking your mail, and you pay for the time you spend reading/deleting/blocking/forwarding to abuse@[spammer's ISP].
Since in the end you the email recipient are paying to see the message, it's almost as if a credit-card company started sending you "pre-approved" card offers every day...postage due. Add to that the servers in between, which cost money to operate, and the number of servers and networks that get clogged by the occasional spammer who emails a couple million people at a time, and the cost mounts up very very quickly.This gets posted to every spam story, but... (Score:5)
Using the SPAM can as the topic icon goes against Hormel Foods', the makers of SPAM, requests that their product not be used in conjunction with unsolicited commerical email. (Full statement on their webpage [spam.com] along with the story of why UCE is called "spam.")
Anyway, I'd like to suggest a new icon for this topic, since the current icon really should be changed. My suggestion is to create an image of three Vikings with the words "spam spam spam" over their heads. It would invoke the original "spam" meaning, which is what the spam topic is truly about, without violating Hormel Foods' quite reasonable request that their product image not be used in conjunction with UCE.
attack dog activists (Score:2)
Re:"ADV: " should be mandatory!!! (Score:2)
Send in the attack dogs!
Re:Why Spam? (Score:2)
Ah, right. The 'fire in crowded theatre' approach. As long as we can restrict methods of free speech, perhaps we should only allow free speech from prison cells. Say whatever you want (not that anyone will hear you.)
Re:Okay, maybe I'm dense... (Score:2)
'junk fax' law not a good target (Score:2)
I get junk faxes all the time, and at first I searched and called and threatened. The faxers know that the cost of collecting is way too high. They're careful to send only a few faxes per year (per shell company, of course). They try to appear to take the complainers seriously, and they'll take you off their lists if you give them enough info to do so (unlike email spammers).
What we want for email spam is a national opt-out list, and huge penalties for spamming people who are on that list. I don't want to let them spam me even once per year, or they'll set up multiple shell companies sharing lists but not domains, and spam the hell out of us anyway.
Re:Okay, maybe I'm dense... (Score:2)
As for the opt-in part, I imagine they could take certain answers from any survey to say that you opted-in. Say for an example you filled out some form to sign up for free web space (like geocities). On that survey you answered a question saying that on of your interests is hamster sex. Later on down the road the survey results get sold to DoubleClick. I can honestly see them twisting the results of that survey. In the end you've said your interested in hamster sex and they have spam customized to your sick desires. It's like NetworkWorld having you fill out a survey about the ads in their mag. They use those results to customize the ads in the mag and in many cases sell your info to groups that specialize in whatever you said you liked. Takes a twist or two but in today's world....
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Sneakemail (Score:2)
Re:Hmm.. (Score:2)
2) Mandatory Opt-in lists will only work if you have filters in place that only allow "verified" addresses to get into your inbox.
The way my former employer does it, if someone is seen to have opted in for mailings, he or she is sent a single confirmation message and must click a link in that message to receive anything more. MAPS calls this "closed-loop subscription."
If successfully enforced, such a system could reduce the noise a bit.
Hmm.. (Score:2)
1) You'll never "stop" spam, or be able to force and ADV: tag. Don't even ponder it, it's not worth the effort.
2) Mandatory Opt-in lists will only work if you have filters in place that only allow "verified" addresses to get into your inbox. That means tons more server space holding all sorts of lists and certificates of verified sources, and anyone not on that list (a customer, a old pal from grade school, Publisher's Clearing House, etc) will never be able to contact you. Blah to that notion.
3) When spam hits your inbox, it IS too late (as several people already said). The effort and CPU cycles are already used. For me to click delete a few times or spend an extra 4 seconds a day on the modem is negligable in a real-world sense. Sure it's annoying, but so is traffic on the highways. That's life, oh well.
4) Lastly, the only REAL way to ever -STOP- spam, or even slow down, is for the bigtime IT guys to say enough is enough and tweak their servers. We have known for a LONG time that a LARGE percentage of spam comes from a certain popular web provider's servers. It's high time that some of the decent IT departments out there got together and started cutting off incoming traffic from servers that have a proven track record of "we don't give a damn about security or IP verification." I imagine that it would only take a few weeks of embargos to convince the other companies to shape up their act. Sure, we can't get them all, but if the bulk of spam is coming from a KNOWN common location, why not plug up that gap?
Yes, I know we'll have to keep plugging gaps, but everyone knows that the best way to approach security is not to be 100% secure, but to be secure enough that the enemy gives up or leaves to find an easier target.
Cost of spam. (Score:2)
First, I hate spam, and spammers, and make every effort not do do business with spammers. HOWEVER...
10 billion euros a year? How so?
I get alot of spam (say 20 messages a day) but I'd have trouble suggesting they cost me *anything* at all. They cost me a few moments to delete. Oh yes, they aggrivate me, and perhaps an American lawyer can tell me how to put an economic value on some slight aggrivation.. but really.. give it a rest.
Hurting them in the pocket book (Score:3)
We need to be able to make it profitable to track down, bill, and collect money from spammers to cover costs. Right now it is entirely way too cost free for them to stop. They will stop when there is no longer any advantadge to this.
The solution I've proposed in the paste is to licence them, make enforcement of the license a federal/central goverment matter.
the licensing is so that they are "tagged" AND can be easily identified. Sort of like a Tax ID number, etc. ISPs and users can use this number to bill them since the data is a public record. make the cost higher than common mail.
Point being that if there is a profit in tracking down spammers, and it is very costly to send spam, then it will stop.
We got to hurt them in the pocket book
Whats worse (Score:4)
Real bothersome that it required me to take additional time outside of my day to click the stupid links to disable eBay's advertising crap, in order to make sure "thats what I really intended" I'd love to see legislation make it fully illegal to spam without explicit opt in (and no cheeky stuff either, like hidden form tags or by saying "Clicking any link in our site opts you in for our spam" - but an explicit mark the box kinda opt in)
Oh well, thats my $.02
Spam Calculator (Score:4)
"ADV: " should be mandatory!!! (Score:4)
this would make spaming useless and it would cut off after a while because no one would even be bothered with reading the subject line.
oh and if you say being forced to add a prefix to teh subject line of an email is a violation of free speach im going to cut your balls off with rusty garden clippers. and yes i am a member of the ACLU
Something interesting (Score:4)
Here is the site [johncglass.com]
Re:All that money for spam? (Score:2)
They want to. But there's no control over the junk coming in unless you use things like RBL and ORBS. Yet you have another vocal group of whiners that try to destroy all that and further promote spamming while giving lip service to idealistic TCP/IP.
Why don't they just extend the junk fax law? (Score:2)
And that is how you turn 10 billion dollars' worth of network abuse into zilch in 2 months flat.
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
Re:anti-UCE (Score:2)
"I don't like spam",
"I especially dislike unsolicited advertising",
"Spam is a very difficult thing to filter",
"I wish people would make an honest living" and
"Spam will die because it will eventually be ineffective"
One point unsolicited e-mail advertisers fail to realise is that like other channels, e-mail can be abused. Sending 10 thousand people the same e-mail constitutes abuse of the entire system we know as the Internet as it uses bandwidth that very well could be used for more important things. If a company abuses the phone, electricity, water systems in the same way, they are subject to large penalties. When will the same types of penalties apply to the Internet??
I've never seen a better use of the Anonymous Coward moniker. Someone says I'm whining just because I exercise my right to an opinion and then hides behind anonymity. If you really want me to take you seriously
Re:What's wrong with spam???? (Score:2)
It may be wrong, but thats the cost of freedom, people do bad shit occassionally. For instance if you ban spam, then you also have to ban unsolicited snail mail, telephone solicitation, door-to-door sales(vaccuum cleaner guy, the boy scouts & camp fire & the local church, etc).
Of the things you mentioned, I would sincerely like to see all of them but the non-profits banned. ESPECIALLY telephone solicitation!
In many places, it IS illegal to solicit door to door if there is a sign indicating that it's unwelcome. It IS illegal in the real world to solicit someone over the telephone once they have told you not to call again.
The problem is, nearly 100% of SPAM is a theft or abuse of service. Typically, the routine goes:
Some add the additional insult of: Move email addresses of complainers to the verified list and sell for 99.95 (In violation of their simple request to be left alone). Then there's the ones who use a valid email address (not theirs) as a reply address.
Added to all of that, about half the spam I get is for scams that ARE, in fact, illegal to send over smail mail.
All of the steps spammers take is based on their certain knowledge that they will annoy a great many people and their desire to avoid hearing from the people that didn't want to hear from them (nice hypocracy).
Re:anti-UCE (Score:4)
For example, a new radio station where I live had commericial free music for two months and it was great. After they introduced commercials and news, commentary, etc. I stopped listening. I wasn't the only one. This should be telling to advertisers trying to market to "Generation Y" (or "d" if you are that young).
While it's nice to know about the next great product, do I really need 100 or so new products clogging my brain (or my e-mail inbox) every day? What if people clogged your voice mail in such a way??
I disagree that the best way to market to people on the net is by effectively spamming them. This makes their e-mail less useful to them. Filtering software can only pick out so many unsolicited e-mails before it starts picking out e-mails that were actually sent to you PERSONALLY.
It's also a damn shame that people insist on making a buck everywhere they go, but this is the world we live in. Sending 100,000 e-mails is probably cheaper than sending 1,000 flyers to people via snail mail. If you get a greater response, who cares right?
In the short term future, this technique will still work. However, as more and more people treat spamming as a social faux pas, we will see less and less businesses using it as an advertising avenue, simply because no one will respond.
Re:Missing the point (Score:2)
Many ISPs do verify first. Stolen ones are generally good for a month or so. And their scams net them a few more credit card numbers of dumb people each time they spam.
Re:Make it Double Opt-in (Score:2)
I think of it this way. (Score:3)
So, for the sake of easy math, about two hours out of my day, 5 or 6 days a week but we'll call it 5 since I'm on salary. So with 52 weeks a year, it costs my employer about US$13000 anually for MY time alone which the spammers have in effect stolen from my employer.
That doesn't count the time of the other people in office and out who get spam and have to delete it, the time I'm sure which is wasted by the foolish ones who actually read the f*cking things (lets face it... what salesman WOULDN'T read the one about how to enlarge their weiner in 30 days?).
There are, of course, some days when there is much less spam, some when there might be more since we have to list our email addresses at a variety of locations and it is unavoidable that our "info@" address will be used.
So if you think about the number of poor slobs in my situation, in the Boston area where I am, there are probably thousands. And if even half of them spend time trying to take a bite out of spam, that would add up to millions of dollars pissed through just to keep some moron from sending out this crap. And if you think about the amount of time we have to spend looking up security patches for sendmail, Exchange, etc., to keep some of the more technical of spammers from using our servers to send their junk, it would add up to even more. And for what? I can not imagine that spammers actually make enough from this to have it be worth their while! But they have to, because why else would these jackasses keep doing it?
*sigh* ah well... it gives me something to do on days I don't have users to LART.
Realworld spam is much worse! (Score:2)
However, I bet realworld spam cost us a hundred times of what electronic spam cost us.
Think about it:
* Trees have to be cut down to make the paper
* Plastics is used
* A lot of polution is produced when the spam is delivered.
And so on...
All theese processes consume a lot of energy, which we get from more or less unclean sources.
You can also count on the wear on our roads and such...
The list can go on forever but I think I've made my point.
What's wrong with spam???? (Score:5)
When a kid can register for an hotmail address and a couple days later be receiving emails for porno that he didn't even ask for. That's just WRONG.
It's also wrong to have to "forge" email headers [marketing-2000.net] to deliver spam, because putting your real email address there would get you into trouble. Having to lie to do something is just plain WRONG.
The spam I get in my email box are not from anybody who wants to do me a favor (like get paid for having sex, we have free money to give you), but rather from people who want to rip me off. That's just plain WRONG.
Scraping my email [web-promotions.com] off a website/newsgroup and because I like to participate in a specific discussion - and using it to try and rip me off is just plain WRONG.
There are no "good" spammers. Just people who think sending 50K emails an hour [bulkemailsoftware.net] is "good". They're just plain WRONG
For the same reasons we have a post office that handles junkmail/direct marketing in a specific way with specific laws, so to we need laws to handle the "spam disease".
The lame "we can't pass any laws because the internet is "international" is bullshit. The telephone is international too, that doesn't mean you can harass me with it. Besides, all the companies above are US based. Let's start with taking out the bastard trash in our corner of the world, and worry about the rest later.
There is so much time-sucking, bandwidth-sucking, hassle-sucking spam out there, that for the same reasons people pass laws against mail and telephone fraud, so to people need to get sick of spam mail and pass laws against Unsolicited Bulk Email.
Here's a little something [spamcop.net] to help those of us who are fed up cope a little.
Just say no (Score:2)
G
One more idea (Score:2)
1) Urge all ISP's to add a clause that in their policy that sending mail with forged headers will cause termination of service and a fine of $25 per mail sent.
2) Invest 10% of the income from these fines in rewards for catching elusive spammers and providing evidence against them.
3) Tighten the laws in various countries so that sending mail with forged headers counts as fraud, mail fraud, or something similar, and is punishable by a hefty fine or even jail time. If possible criminalize the sending of forged mail from anywhere to within the jurisdiction, as well as from the jurisdction to anywhere in the world.
This still leaves those spammers who actually use their own name in the neaders, but they are a minority, and knowing who they are, we can organize boycotts, mail campaigns, and other forms of civil disobedience to make them see the errors of their ways.
Re:Okay, maybe I'm dense... (Score:2)
Lawyer speak for: "You agree that we can do anything with the information we extract from you, you'll buy the products we advertise, blah blah blah, first born child to be handed over to us as soon as s/he can be of some use, blah blah blad"
And then: If your browser pull ads from our servers that mean that you've read and accepted the license. There is no opt-out from this license.
Kind of like MS licenses, but worse.
Priceless! (Score:3)
From the article:
"In Khrushchev Remembers, Nikita Khrushchev credited SPAM for keeping the Soviet Army alive during World War II. "We had lost our most fertile, food-bearing lands, the Ukraine and the Northern Caucasians. Without SPAM, we wouldn't have been able to feed our army."
Cost of spam? Priceless!
Re:Make it Double Opt-in (Score:2)
So tell us ... what company has a stupid boss? What company should we avoid?
Why Spam? (Score:4)
I've seen the future, I've worked there. I don't see spam going away, no matter how much it costs or annoys us, nor do I see addresses not being sold and used for "direct mail".
I hear lots of talk about requiring "opt in", but can the US really do that? I don't opt in when a political canidate comes to my door to sell me on his campaign - and I shouldn't, for that's what free speech means. Where in the constitution does the federal government get that power (and don't say "regulating interstate commerce!"). Why would a government that allows sale of postal addresses (a physical safety threat!) but not allow sale of "virtual" addresses?
One ironic part of the internet is that every user thinks that they should have ultimite protection of free speech, and that the Internet should never be censored. We should be able to view our porn without risk of being jailed. Yet, at the same time, while porn is considered protected by internet activists (although, it could be argued, forms of pornography harm society) - these same activists want to ban a form of speech that they happen to not like - spam.
Oh, that's right, spam costs the sender money. You see, in the US, where we pay $19.95 for unlimited internet access, we consider a modem downloading a few thousands ones to be "expensive". Face it: it's not. True, some spammers have abused other's resources, but there will be many who don't. (Spammers may even pay a fee to the ISP affected by the spam, the same way junk mailers pay the post office - but I bet people will still hate the spam just as much) You still pay for postal junk mail, too. You might even pay more for postal mail than for spam! My time is fairly valuable, as I have a limited amount of it in my lifetime. I venture to say it takes slightly more time to throw away a junk postal mail than to delete a spam email (especially if the postal mail is a credit card application, and I'd rather someone else didn't use that information). Yet, my time is considered less valuble than a fraction of a cent that it costs a spam to sit on some server.
Oh, and for the record: I hate spam. But, I realize that I live in a free society and sometimes people do things that I really don't like. True freedom is only possible when someone can anger another without fear of the law or their safety.
Re:Why Spam? (Score:2)
One of my favorites is was one claiming that they had seen my website and thought it was wonderful, and they would like to show me how to bring in more traffic.
My website at the time said 'under construction' in default black text on gray.
Re:Easy solution (Score:2)
1. All ISPs need to really check the validity of a credit card before authorizing the new customer. If it takes two days to do this, so what? No one needs to get an email account right away at 2am. I suggest a new law that requires credit card companies to provide some method that can absolutely determine whether a credit card is valid, and that ISPs are required to use this service.
Charging the first month immediatly will at least validate the card. The hard part would be determining that it wasn't recently stolen.
Re:What's wrong with spam???? (Score:2)
Re:Cost of spam. (Score:2)
My suggestion: (Score:2)
Re:Why Spam? (Score:2)
Now FOAD, spammer.
Better yet, GTFOTN (Get The Fuck Off The Net), and then die, spammer.
Re:Why Spam? (Score:2)
Get real- not every business has any need to let people around the world know about their product or service.
Re:Why Spam? (Score:4)
Spam costs the receiver money, which is what I think you meant. Let me give a quick example: I run a couple of domains on a 486/33. They exist primarily as email addresses for me and for me to have SSH access to a Real Command Interpreter(TM). However, my resources are seriously affected by the 100s (and I'm serious here, split among about 3 active email addresses and five or six inactive ones) of spam messages that my mail server filters out each day. That doesn't even include the time and effort I spent setting up the mail server (and then getting it to play nice with fetchmail) or the time that I learned why an open relay was a Bad Thing(TM) the hard way (including a complementary blocking of all outbound traffic to port 25 from my machine until I resolved the problem).
Bottom line: it's not just the 3-10 seconds (don't laugh, when the pipes at both ends are full, it can very definitely take 10 or more seconds for Pine to refresh the screen with the next message) it takes me to delete each email that makes it through my filters; it's also about the bandwidth, disk resources, and CPU resources it takes to either (a) keep that email from reaching my inbox or (b) receiving it and routing it to my inbox. Banners are quite different because they are (well, except for those annoying ECMAScript no-kill popup ones) opt-in and most of the cost is borne by the advertiser or the carrier of the advertising.
Re:Spam-hating has gone out of style (Score:2)
Yes I do believe the banner ads are a nessary evil of the internet but not spamming. You can choose what websites you can go you can not choose who sends you junk e-mail. The difference between junk mail and junk e-mail is that junk mail does not cost you a thing to recieve it. Now junk e-mail it cost you your computer and a monthly fee inorder for you to get junk e-mail. Also junk e-mail also take up your ISP's and your personal computer's resources. Your argument is flawed my friend. Have a good day