Article 244 of meer.list.inet-access: Path: matra.meer.net!gateway From: mikey@mangonet.com (Mike Rodriguez) Newsgroups: meer.list.inet-access Subject: Re: **SPAM, Mail-Relay, and What Really is SPAM ??** Date: 22 Apr 1997 05:35:15 -0000 Organization: meer.net Lines: 101 Distribution: meer Message-ID: <2.2.32.19970422053103.01b3a93c@mango.mangonet.com> Reply-To: inet-access@earth.com NNTP-Posting-Host: matra.meer.net Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Xref: matra.meer.net meer.list.inet-access:244 At 06:28 PM 4/8/97 -0700, Ken Bolingbroke wrote: >But with email, all I have to do is hit the reply key and type in a nasty >note--doesn't cost me a cent and only takes a few seconds. Or even >better, add 'em to my mail filter so I never hear from them again. From www.vix.com Time = money. 1. The free ride. E-mail spam is unique in that the receiver pays so much more for it than the sender does. For example, AOL has said that they were receiving 1.8 million spams from Cyber Promotions per day until they got a court injunction to stop it. Assuming that it takes the typical AOL user only 10 seconds to identify and discard a message, that's still 5,000 hours per day of connect time spent discarding their spam, just on AOL. SOMEONE has to pay for that connect time, and that's the recipient through higher connect charges. By contrast, the spammer probably has a T1 line that costs him about $100/day. No other kind of advertising costs the advertiser so little, and the recipient so much. The closest analogy I can think of would be auto-dialing junk phone calls to cellular users, and you can imagine how favorably that might be received. 2. The scaling problem. Many spam messages say ``please send a REMOVE message to get off our list.'' Even disregarding the question of why you should have to do anything to get off a list you never asked to join, this becomes completely impossible if the volume grows. At the moment, most of us only get a few spams per day. But imagine if only 1/10 of 1 % of the users on the Internet decided to send out spam at a moderate rate of 100,000 per day, a rate easily achievable with a dial-up account and a PC. Then everyone would be receiving 100 spams every day. If 1% of users were spamming at that rate, we'd all be getting 1,000 spams per day. Is it reasonable to ask people to send out 100 ``remove'' messages per day? Hardly. If spam grows, it will crowd our mailboxes to the point that they'll be useless for real mail. Users on AOL, which has a lot of trouble with internal spammers, report that they're already nearing this point. 3. It's all garbage. The spam messages I've seen have almost without exception advertised stuff that's worthless, deceptive, and partly or entirely fraudulent. (I include the many MLMs in here, even though the MLM-ers rarely understand why there's no such thing as a good MLM.) It's spam software, funky miracle cures, off-brand computer parts, vaguely described get rich quick schemes, dial-a-porn, and so on downhill from there. It's all stuff that's too cruddy to be worth advertising in any medium where they'd actually have to pay the cost of the ads. Also, since the cost of spamming is so low, there's no point in targeting your ads, when for the same low price you can send the ads to everyone, increasing the noise level the rest of us have to deal with. Note that I'm not making a reference to you or your company, only to the fact that spammers are generally perceived this way and generally have a reputation for sleaziness. Even if you and your company are legitimate, your reputation, once you're perceived as a spammer, will suffer. 4. They're crooks. Spam software invariably comes with a list of names falsely claimed to be of people who've said they want to receive ads, but actually consisting of unwilling victims culled at random from usenet or mailing lists. Spam software often promises to run on a provider's system in a way designed to be hard for the provider to detect so they can't tell what the spammer is doing. Spams invariably say they'll remove names on request, but they almost never do. Indeed, people report that when they send a test ``remove'' request from a newly created account, the usually start to receive spam at that address. Spammers know that people don't want to hear from them, and generally put fake return addresses on their messages so that they don't have to bear the cost of receiving responses from people to whom they've send messages. Whenever possible, they use "disposable" trial ISP accounts so the ISP bears the cost of cleaning up after them. I could go on, but you get the idea. It's hard to think of another line of business where the general ethical level is so low. Again, note that I'm not making a reference to you or your company, only to the fact that spammers are generally perceived this way and generally have a reputation for sleaziness. Any one of these four would be enough to make me pretty unhappy about getting junk e-mail. Put them together and it's intolerable. ----------------------------------------- Mike Rodriguez Finger for PGP public key. MangoNet Communications, Inc. Web Designs and MicroSoft FrontPage Web Hosting http://www.mangonet.com/ ----------------------------------------- ============================== ISP Mailing List ============================== Email ``unsubscribe'' to inet-access-request@earth.com to be removed. Do not post flames to the list -- if you must flame, use private email.