Amy wrote on Saturday about e-stamps and there were some interesting things brought up. It was only after I left my comment that I read the comment by Matt Jones (whose link seems not to work at the moment). So here’s a more thorough take on the issue.
Why Spam?
The answer to why spam exists is really quite simple… because it works. Spam is a form of direct-marketing, much like junk mail. Direct-marketing has, on average, a fairly low rate of return. The low rate of return is prohibitive for mail, where sending an item costs money… I’m not sure what pre-sorted, bulk-rate mail goes for these days but assume it’s 20 cents… to send 10,000 fliers is going to run a business $2,000. In order for that form of direct marketing to be profitable, they have to bring in more than $2,000 worth of sales for 10,000 fliers.
Email, however, is EXTREMELY inexpensive to send. Buying a list of email addresses is cheap… I’m not sure what a spam “company” charges for a run, but my sources tell me it’s something on the order of three tenths of a cent per email if you want a company to send it for you. A list of a million addresses, though, costs less than $50. For the above $2,000, you could send two thirds of a million emails. Now let’s do a little math using our made-up numbers.
If your product costs P dollars, you’re going to need a rate of return of ($2,000) / (10,000 x P) or 1 / (5 x P) sales to break even… for bulk email you’re looking at ($3,000) / (1,000,000 x P) or 1 / (0.003 x P) to break even. Let’s examine what happens if the price of your product is $50. That makes the rate of return necessary for mail 1 out of 250 or 0.4%. For email, that figure is an astonishingly low 3 out of 50,000… or 0.006%…
If I lost you in the math, just believe this: for the same amount of money, you can send out many times more emails than mail advertisements… so you need many times FEWER positive responses in order to profit. I guess I could’ve just said that to begin with, couldn’t I? (Do keep in mind that those are made-up numbers… don’t use them for anything meaningful or important)
Why is it bad?
When someone picks up the phone and calls you, who pays? The caller. If a telemarketer called you on your cell phone while you were roaming, and you answered only to be met with a huge roaming charge, you wouldn’t be happy, I don’t suppose. With email, who pays?
The answer is that we ALL pay. The price of internet service is, to a large extent, determined by how much bandwidth our ISPs need. That’s determined by how much traffic their clients have. If bandwidth needs shrunk by 50%, the price of internet service would tend go down as well… maybe not by the same amount, but it would go down all the same. I’ve seen reports that as little as 40% of all internet traffic and as much as 91% of all email traffic is spam. That’s a HUGE amount of traffic… especially considering all of the song-downloading, web-browsing, and photo-emailing going on these days. Those percentages have been doing nothing but growing over the past few years as well.
So it may be easy enough to delete the spam once it’s in your inbox but the inconvenience of deleting it is a small matter when compared to the drag on the internet’s efficiency and performance.
E-Stamps
One sure way to rid ourselves of most spam, is to make people pay for email. The cost of SENDING spam would go up, thereby requiring a higher rate of return to make the option profitable. Once you get the required rate of return above the rate of human stupidity, you’ve got a solution. Any time I hear about e-stamps, however, I have to cringe… the implementation of such a system would be EXPENSIVE, and would only widen the “digital divide” between the US and other, less-developed nations. Ignoring that for a moment, though, let’s talk technicalities.
The first solution that comes to my mind is very much the same as Matt Jones’, however I tend to think more about the messy implementation details. The fact of the matter is that this is not a clean thing to implement. I’ve brain-stormed this before, and for every system I dream up, I can immediately think of a dozen ways to break it. The final solution would probably hinge on one central database of “authorized” and “secure” email servers. Owners of the servers on the list would have to provide some sort of personal identification and sign contracts obligating themselves to make sure that the email sent from their servers was legitimate. Unauthorized servers would only be allowed to send email to recipients that specifically opted-in to email from such servers. When a secure server got a request from an insecure server to transmit an email, it would check with the recpient’s “home” server to see if email was allowed. If so, it would pass it along and from that point forward the email would be considered “secure” as it would have come from a trusted source.
Along with this central database, there also has to be a way to transfer funds from one “server” to another… the servers would be responsible, not the end users, for the charges. If the server wanted to pass along those charges, they could do so. Large ISPs would probably just include the fee as a normal part of your monthly fee.
Essentially you would create a secure network of trusted servers from which email was allowed. From that point forward, it would be fairly easy to develop some sort of auditing system to keep track of who owes whom and how much.
Vigilante Justice
Another way to make spam horrifically expensive for the spammers is for everyone to respond to every single spam we get. I don’t mean “respond” as in “buy” — I mean… call the 800 numbers, send reply emails, bait them as long as you can until you finally decide not to buy anything. If we could get a sufficiently large percentage of the spam receiving population to do this, the cost of spam would probably sky-rocket, as you’d have to deal with a LOT of false interest.
This solution, as much as I like it, will never work. But it’s a nice thought.
Conclusion
So I got about half-way through a lot of ideas and realized it would take a lot more thought and effort to fully flesh it out than I was willing to give it tonight. Hopefully, though, this sheds a bit of light on the subject if you’ve never thought about it before. Basically, spam is not bad because it’s annoying… spam is bad because it’s a drain on the network.
Reference links:
http://www.techtv.com/news/culture/story/0,24195,3423724,00.html
http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2004/3/emw108185.htm
I equate your vigilante justice to the thought that my friends and I had in pre school. That we could get out of school if we left the water faucets on in the bathroom causing a high water bill thereby causing the school to go broke. There was a certain logic in it back then which seems to elude me now. I am sure that this elusion is a good thing.
I have to admit that this was a topic I never really sat down and thought about before I saw the original cnn.com article and made my first post. I must say that I never considered the bandwidth that spam takes up or anything like that…so I am enjoying immensely the dialog posting this has created! I have learned and am learning a lot! Of course…I can’t believe that you are actually doing the math around it for fun (to enlighten me and others)…because that is just crazy.
The vigilante justice may not work overall, but in some instancews it just makes me feel better. If ANYONE sends me unsolicited snail mail with a pre-paid envelope inside, I always reply. Not with an order, sometimes not even with anything other than a blank piece of paper, but I reply. I use up their bulk postage and I never include anything that identifies me. Most of the time I just cut out my name and address and then include their own original material with a big hole in it. It’s a small little thing, but [insert evil laugh here] and I am doing my part to keep then at bay.
Evil! (I like it!)
You know, the more stuff you send back, the more it costs… so if you happen to have any plastic or metal lying around that fits in an envelope, go nuts.
I have some friends that do the whole “return mail stuffing” thing, it seems pretty interesting!
It seems to me the spammers are fed by email lists, which are sold by companies who need to raise money, sometimes companies who give me things for free. I.e. selling a list is the same to yahoo as having someone place an ad on their site, it’s revenue either way.
Direct mail (even spamming) is a legitimate, even if disgusting, practice. But I will grant Pete the benefit of the doubt about the drag on internet resources.
To me, it’s worth it to spend 2 minutes a day hitting delete or running filters to catch spam, as opposed to the cost of e-stamping. Because the setup costs alone would be massive, and you can bet who will be paying that bill in the end!
“It seems to me the spammers are fed by email lists, which are sold by companies who need to raise money”
That’s a really narrow view of the situation. This does happen, but I’d venture to guess that those situations make up the (vast) minority of spam for a few reasons:
a) Places like yahoo tend to have opt-in lists and sell them to legitimate, spammers.
b) A great many spammers don’t buy lists but harvest their own email addresses from the WWW.
c) Because of b, lists from Yahoo (etc) are less attractive because they’re more expensive, and generally spam isn’t intended to be well-targeted. It’s just a scatter-shot going for quantity of contacts over quality. (Which is why women get ads for penis-enlargement, etc.)
The fact of the matter is that you have to pay one way or another… you either pay to eliminate spam, or you pay in degredation of service and more expensive ‘net services.
In fact, though this is a smaller impact, large companies spend a significant amount of money dealing with spam — and guess who pays for that?