In (Sort Of) Defense of Spammers

CowboyRobot writes "Eric Allman of Sendmail has a rant in which he looks at the economic forces that have led to the spam problem: 'The sad point of all of this is that I'm going to (sort of) defend the spammers and point out that they are responding to basic economic forces that we all respond to at one level or another. As long as spammers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to spam. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.'" Otherwise known as the Willie Sutton principle.

Spammers aren't the only ones

[packeteer]

Drug dealers and people who commit fraud aren't going to go away becuase they can make money ding what they do. We still despise them and send them to jail when we find them.

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Drug dealers and people who commit fraud aren't going to go away becuase they can make money ding what they do. We still despise them and send them to jail when we find them.

The problem is, drug dealers and people who commit fraud are breaking the law. Now, while many (most?) spammers are commiting fraud, technically it's possible to spam the hell out of everyone quite legally.

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[kfg]

But this actually has very little to do with the economics of spamming. It simply modifies the risk factor in the equation, which, with regards to spamming, is minimal to nonexistant, even when defrauding or otherwise breaking the law.

If spam is where the money is Willie is going to break in.

The real diffence is that Willie broke into one place to steal a little money from each of us at one time.

Spammers "break" into millions of places to steal a few pennies from individuals here and there.

Willie we can deal with. Guard the pile of money.

A godzillion little cat burglers operating all at once is another story.

KFG

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[mindstrm]

It's more of a tragedy of the commons (similar to, not the same)

If there were one spammer, sending one piece of spam to everyone on earth a day, and getting rich off it, it would NOT be a problem.... the effect on everyone else is negligible.

If the gain to the spammer is X, the loss on his million victims is on millionth of X each.

The problem is that there are many spammers.. so though each spammer sees his effect on individual recipients as tiny, the overall problem is quite large.

Contrast to the sheep scenario in tragedy of the commons... one guy adding one extra sheep to common land being grazed at capacity already is a net benefit of one sheep to the farmer, but the corresponding negative effect to him is shared among ALL those who share the land... so he sees a net gain. The problem is that every participant would come to the same coclusion, and add mroe sheep... cancelling out the percieved gain, to the detrement of all.

No, much worse

[robogun]

If the gain to the spammer is X, the loss on his million victims is on millionth of X each...

From what I understand, a spammer selling, for instance, penis enlargement pills will sell three or four bottles from a spam run of 100 million spams. Let's say he makes $200 and assume it is pure profit (it is).

Let's further assume of the 100 million spams, 10 million made it to the Microsoft Outlook Inboxes of unique users. Let's say that each spam took 5 seconds to delete. If their time is worth $10/hour (assume half the victims are kids students etc, and half are professionals) the spammer cost them $100,000 of their time to make his lousy $200.

This does not take into account higher ISP fees, anti-spam program costs, credit card back charges, loss of business from lost legit emails, and the terabytes of wasted bandwidth for each and every spam run.

Spammers are conscious of this and their continuing to do it is an indication of sociopathic behavior.

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[leerpm]

Technically.. but the vast majority of them are now in violation of the new anti-spam legislation. They have no regard for the legality of what they are doing.

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[Have Blue]

That, and drug dealers are only consuming the resources of people who voluntarily seek out their services. They aren't crop-dusting entire neighborhoods with cocaine in the hope that someone will get hooked and come looking for more.

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[pantycrickets]

I really like the idea of neighborhoods being cropdusted with cocaine. It kind of reminds me of the videos they showed us in school when I was a kid with the people having a picnic while they're being spray with DDT. Cocaine would have made that video a lot funnier though, imo.

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[fishbonez]

In the world of crystal meth, the drug dealers do in fact create a market by giving away meth in new areas. Then a number of the recipients of the free samples will be hooked. The drug dealers have created market for their product that did not exist previously.

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[Dun Malg]

My comments were specific to crystal meth, which is marketed differently than other drugs. Nobody is going to give away weed or cocaine as there is no need. Crystal meth is a huge problem in rural areas precisely because of how it is marketed. A drug dealer can set up a production lab in a rural area and create a supply but have no market. They then initiate a demand through the free giveaways. Then there is sufficient demand to meet the supply. Crystal meth is supply side driven and not demand driven in the startup phase, which is unlike other drugs where the demand is pre-existing.

This has mostly to do with the ease of production of meth. Drugs will sell anywhere you can supply them. I find it hard to believe that nobody in rural areas would touch meth if they had to pay for it, but as soon as they're offered a free taste they're all over it. Meth is so damn cheap that the difference between "free" and "full price" isn't enough to keep people away unless they're hooked. Fact is, rural areas are so goddamned boring that there's always a guaranteed market for any sort of chemical diversion. Crystal meth has been continuously available in any decent-sized town from minnesota to texas for 20+ years. I was an on and off meth user for 15 years in places like San Angelo, TX and Iowa City, IA (NOT big towns) and never have I ever even heard second-hand of anyone being offered free meth. I wish it were true (I'd be all over that shit!) but the "first taste free" urban legend has never panned out.

Chris Rock said it best

[fluxrad]

"No one finds a briefcase full of crack on the street and asks, 'Hmm...how am I going to get rid of all this crack?'."

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[cens0r]

The asshole that got him hooked was himself. Drug dealers don't hold you down and an inject you. Dealers don't want addicts as customers if they can help it. Addicts are unreliable, poor, and much more likely to get busted for some other crime and flip on the dealer. It's the drug laws that create the situation you are describing, not the drugs themselves.

I've never heard of anyone committing roberies to get a pack of winstons.

Re:Tell me you're kidding...

[Eccles]

Sigh. This is the short-sighted, disconnected view of drug abuse that seems to typify the "legalize drugs now" crowd. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

Right.

When somebody busts out the window of a car to steal a stereo to sell so that they can buy drugs with which to overdose

Doesn't seem to happen for alcohol. Why? 'Cause it's cheaper and legal.

Look, legalization isn't going to make drug abuse go away, but 30 years of wars on drugs hasn't either. And at best, the drug laws simply push most potential abusers to alcohol. Are teetotallers going to suddenly start mainlining heroin if it were no longer outlawed? I don't think so.

But legalization does get rid of many of the side effects of drug laws. Seagrams' distributors rarely shoot it out with the Johnny Walker guys. We aren't spending billions on imprisoning beer sellers. Alcohol dealers have an incentive not to sell to the underage. And the guy who drives the Budweiser truck isn't flashing his dough around the projects, making beer-selling look like a glamorous role to those with poor prospects.

Re:Tell me you're kidding...

[Flamerule]

Sigh. This is the short-sighted, disconnected view of drug abuse that seems to typify the "legalize drugs now" crowd. Nothing happens in a vacuum. The parent comment isn't insightful or even interesting - it's tragic, if the poster actually believes it. When somebody busts out the window of a car to steal a stereo to sell so that they can buy drugs with which to overdose, then go to the hospital, have the bill paid for by the county, to whom we pay taxes, then off to detox, again supported by our taxes...then start the whole process over again.

Huh. Sounds like you've just given several good reasons for legalizing and regulating drugs.

1. If drugs were legalized, people would be paying low, reasonable prices, not obscene black market prices. Hence a dramatically lessened need for people to steal shit to support their habit.
2. If drugs were regulated, we wouldn't be seeing low-quality, dangerous goods of varying potentness. Hence a dramatically lessened occurrence of overdosing.

Now, the grandparent was wrong. The use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs carries a significant negative externality: the costs society incurrs in dealing with drug problems...

I've seen it in Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston and New York. I've even seen it in places that you've never heard of, like Nampa, Idaho and Portsmouth, Rhode Island.

... So let's fucking DO something about it, instead of blindly continuing this insane War on Drugs.

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[Quixadhal]

Yes, and this isn't a defense of spammers, it's a deficiency in the law.

Afterall, there's nothing *inherantly* bad about drug dealers who simply obtain a product and sell it to those who desire it. Our society has mandated that certain substances are detrimental to the public good, and thus have been outlawed. People selling these banned items are violating that law, and thus are held accountable when possible.

I would suggest that spam is also detrimental to the public good, both in paper form and as electronic transmissions. It costs everyone in terms of lost resources needed to support the delivery mechanism (lag on the internet, extra manpower and slower deliveries in the post office), and the only people gaining anything are the spammers themselves.

This doesn't even touch on the personal cost of being a spam recipient. Telemarketing calls can drive people to ignore important calls out of fear or anger, documents and bills can get lost in the mail because they get mixed into a pile of spam, and certainly email accounts can be rendered almost worthless if the spam level rises so great that they exceed their quota, blocking legitimate mail delivery.

So don't defend spammers by saying it's not illegal, instead let's make it illegal and start making spammers pay for the resources they are using.

If Spam eq Fraud, where are the prosecutions?

[swb]

This is something that's bothered me for a long time. If spam largely is fraudulent (direct ripoff) or advertising fraudulent products (real product, doesn't work), or even criminal (selling drugs illegally), why don't we ever hear about prosecutions for this?

Presumably the money trail is the easist thing to follow in a spam message, particularly with the scary new laws associated with money movement these days. It also seems that RICO statutes could be used to ensnare pretty much everyone involved as part of a corrupt enterprise. And then you go away for hard time, 10-20 and forfeit most of your assets to $100k+ fines.

Given that these laws are powerful and their penalties severe, it would seem that a couple of major RICO busts would put a serious dent in the overall spam business. It would not eliminate it completely, but serious jail time for some of the larger members as well as continuing prosecutions might make it much more scarce.

My own theory is that the government is loathe to prosecute fraud, simply because "aggressive marketing" is so entrenched in otherwise "legitimate" business. My tinfoil hat extension to this theory is that otherwise legitimate businesses are profiting immensely from spam (albeit at an arm's length), and have told FTC/FBI to go easy on it (naturally through their paid-up contributions to their favorite officials).

Although to this day, I'm still wondering why nobody seems to go to jail for selling bogus penis pills and Valium without a perscription.

You are correct, as told in a previous /. story.

[khasim]

I can't find the story right now, but someone set up a bogus email account and replied to spam about a home loan.

He was contacted by big companies that had bought the "lead" from contractors (who bought it from sub-contractors who bought it from sub-sub-contractors who .....).

The big companies say that they frequently purchase such leads from other companies and that if they receive complaints about those companies, then they drop them.

Of course, the spammer just opens a "new" "company" under a different name and starts selling to the big companies again.

Since the big companies don't "know" that they're dealing with a spammer.......

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[hyperstation]

i don't despise them....

drug dealers are providing a service: they sell drugs to those who want to buy them. they make the processes involved in manufacturing, transporting and distributing the drugs transparent to their clients.

there are bad dealers and good dealers. good dealers are customer service oriented - they know that they are providing a service, and go an extra mile to ensure quality and fairness to the customer. the customer can always find a new dealer.

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Drug dealers can range from all types of personalities. They are not all evil, dangerous individuals who need to be put behind bars. A lot of them have normal jobs, normal lives with families, and good morals for raising children. I can personally atttest to this fact, not by my own family, but by close friends. What I say is true especially with marijuana, which I believe is terribly and biasedly presented by government propoganda. If you spend time looking around at more unbiased sources you'll discover some interesting facts, especially when it became an illegal / restricted drug in 1937, as well as the studies that have been used against it in the past that have now been assertively refuted by established researching communities.

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[Politburo]

Some people think differently. I would never teach my hypothetical kids that the law is something to be blindly obeyed.

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[garcia]

bad analogy. Not all spammers are commiting fraud. All drug dealers and call people who commit fraud should go to jail. Not all spammers should.

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[hyperstation]

mod parent back up, cuz he makes sense.

and i'm a "liberal".

tobacco companies are addressing a stated need (desire?) by the public for their product, only they receive the blessing of the goverment along with it. and as soon as we're told that nicotine delivery devices such as cigarettes are illegal, your friendly neighborhood smoke dealer will be peddling on your street.

same goes for alcohol.

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

You mean like the file-sharing thieves? They steal bandwidth too...

How exactly? All fire-sharers I know are PAYING for the bandwidth they are using. Are you insinuating that I (err, I mean my file-sharing friend) could somehow steal YOUR bandwidth and use that?

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[Oliver Wendell Jones]

But if they're paying their bill, then they're not stealing.

Are they abusing the concept of "unlimited always on" bandwidth? Maybe.

Are they violating copyrights by sharing files they don't legally have the rights to distribute? Possibly.

Are they stealing? No.

If you look at practically any system, you'll find that a certain percentage of your population uses up more than their fair share of the resources.

I helped do a study on diabetes care management and we found that the worst 10% of the diabetes population subset were responsible for more than 70% of the total medical costs for diabetes related issues.

Were those 10% of the diabetics who ate hot fudge sundaes for breakfast, lunch and dinner "stealing" from their HMO? No, absolutely not.

File sharers, or Linux distro junkies or anyone who uses a majority of the bandwidth available to them is not stealing, either. Yes, they are expensive customers to keep but they're not stealing from you any more than a person who uses every possible coupon and discount to cut their grocery bill in half is stealing from the grocery store.

Some customers you make money on (Grandpa Jones who wants to log in twice a week to check his e-mail and see pictures of his grandkids) and customers you lose money on (your Linux distro junkies). The trick is to have more of the former and less of the latter, otherwise you're not going to stay in business long.

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[RLW]

However, if I want drugs I have to go find a drug dealer.
If I don't want spam I have to go find a lawyer?
That doesn't sound right.

The solution is to find a way to make e-mail cost money to use. It's only because e-mail is so cheep to abuse that spam is so prevalent.

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[jmv]

The solution is to find a way to make e-mail cost money to use. It's only because e-mail is so cheep to abuse that spam is so prevalent.

You really think that? Ever heard of spammers making worms/virus so their spam gets sent from other machines? If email costs money, the bill would get paid by these people not the spammers (and the spam would continue).

Just make mass-marketing a pay model

[kollivier]

What if an ISP did the following:

Email "light" - you can only send messages to up to 20 recipients - more than that will be met with an error message from the SMTP server

Email "plus" - $4.95 a month, and you can send mail up to 100 recipients at a time - again, an error message if limit is exceeded

Email "bulk" - you need to specifically call to enable this, and it allows you to send to as many recipients as you want, but every recipient over 100 people is $0.01 per person.

Thus, a spammer could not use a person's machine as a spam conduit because the person would be unable to send the spam! Now, the spammer could put a mailing list on their own server and then make a worm to send to that, but they'd still have to get and maintain a server for the mailing list, so what's the point?

Another nice note - it makes things a pain in the butt for people who want to send chain letters to everyone in their address book. People that do this are unlikely to either take the time to create groups of 20, and send the message several times, nor do I think they'll pay $4.95 for the ability to send junk messages.

I think the grandparent poster is absolutely right. Make SPAM cost something for the sender and then only people who can afford to pay will send SPAM, and the overall amount should decrease, probably dramatically.

Kevin

Attention Dumbass

[npsimons]

(Apologies to those who have seen this before.)

You advocate a

( ) technical (x) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
(x) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're stupid for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[rjelks]

If you want to use this analogy then consider the success of the "war on drugs." A large part of the problem is that most sources are coming from outside our country where we have little influence. With spam, even if we could stop it in the U.S., we'd have to contend with the rest of the world. I still think that we should be going after the advertisers and not the spammers. Spammers always hide their identity through spoofing, but the advertiser is right there in the email. I could see people getting

Other Solutions

[Alien54]

There is always the following classic option, as first posted on Segfault back in april 99:

Mafia Don Announces New Anti-Spam Venture

As the NSA and FBI fear, traditional crime organizations have been incorporating high-tech communication into their organizations. Although Janet Reno was quoted stating "This is law enforcement's worst nightmare.", techies around the world are sure to be pleased with one New York Syndicate's new venture.

It all started when Don Dominiqi signed onto his AOL account last Monday morning. His inbox was filled with "Make Money Fast", "Viagra On-Line", and "Teenybopper Web Sex" ads. Lost amidst the drivel was an important note detailing a non-taxed shipment of Marlboros, which were later confiscated by the BATF. Little did he know, as he shouted "Bring me the left hand of this f*cking gutterslime!" what would become of it all.

Later that same day, Billy "Run!" Brutekowski and Larry "My Eyes!" Plucker cornered the pasty-faced offender of the Family in a small cyber cafe in Grenich Village. "This was by far the creepiest place the Boss has ever sent us." stated Billy, who only spoke on condition of anonymity. "Everyone in this place looked pale and sickly, like they had already been 'spoken to'. We asked for this punk, and several people quickly pointed him out. Most of the scum we find in gin joints aren't so quick to finger one of their own," Billy continued.

"He must not watch much TV, because this sh*t didn't even flinch when we came to the corner he was hiding in," Larry proceeded to relate. "We dropped this sheet of paper the Boss had given us on his table and he says 'So you guys want to make money fast, eh?' He puts out his and says to give him $20. This scrawny little dirtball tells me to give him $20!" Larry was quite agitated at this part in his story, and his description of how Sammy Spammer's hand fell off was quite garbled.

Billy continued, "Up till now, this was a routine visit. We was just being playful. The weird sh*t began when we tried to leave." "This pimply faced kid blocks the door as we try to leave, and I'm thinking to myself 'Great, a f*cking Karate Kid hero. He just stand there, and then he hands me a $5 bill." Billy pulls out the $5, and holds it like it is his first quarter from his favorite grandmother. "They lined up after that, and we had $175 in 'tips' when we left the joint."

Later that day the Don himself visited the cafe, unwilling to believe the story. Although the details are unclear, sources at the cafe indicate that the Don has hired them to build and host a new Anti-Spam site. Through a SSL transaction system, the site will accept spam complaints and credit card donations towards 'solutions to problems'. Multiple complaints against the same spammer are added to the total until an acceptable solution has been found.

Larry tells us that a typical $250 solution is a broken hand, and for $2000 all anyone ever sees again of 'the problem' are his shoes.

The URL is to be announced next week, and the cyber cafe's phones have been jammed with requests for more information.

I've posted this before, but it is still funny.

Re:Spammers aren't the only ones

[swb]

The problem with your IP technique is the same one with RBLs -- collateral damage. Spammers will just move their sites to shared servers on the same IP address, and you'll be blocking other users access to those same servers.

I personally don't have a problem with the collateral damage; while it does hurt some sites, they should be pressuring their ISPs to not colocate them on subnets or systems used by spammers. ISPs that won't do this should lose business, and it should become harder for spammers to get

The solution is simple

[FortKnox]

Kill all the Marketing Majors.

Re:Spam and Marketing

[herrvinny]

carefully-target unsolicited email (aka spam) was an essential part of our business plan

He's a spammer! I'll grab the tar, someone get feathers and pitchforks.. ..

Re:Spam and Marketing

[dubious9]

Funny, but grand parent makes a good point. Spam is legit. I wouldn't mind getting an e-mail from the pizza place down the street, or that a near-by mall store is having a sale. I wouldn't mind a grocery store sending me coupons, or anything like that.

Just put "adv:" in the subject so I don't have to look at it if I don't want to. The problem isn't with spam, it is with the unaccountability of e-mail. Fix fradulent headers, have clear subject line, ensure accountability, sprinkle some legislation, and e-mail becomes a legit enterprise.

Thing is you have to throw in some things for spammers too, or they'll always try to break the rules. Provide a mechanism to target geographic and demographic areas. Perhaps a WHOIS registry for e-mail, perhaps only stating 'mail service start in CITY,STATE,COUNTRY'. Make it so that only people with a physical presence in that region can spam users in that region. Restrict access to this database with a fee and ensure only that person is spamming with 'sender permitted from' (SPF) Then there is a way to _target_ and _control_ spam.

Spam becomes a valuable tool for regular businesses and spammers cater to them and not porn and adult services and whatever other crap is being produced now. Users see real advantage in reading spam because it is about stuff in their region, and could possible save them money. People buy the sunday paper for the ads, people will read spam for the same purpose. Everybody wins, even spammers.

Marketers sometimes fail to see that you can't force advertising down on people. Give the people a reason to listen to you, and they will come.

Spam apologist! Kill him!

[IshanCaspian]

For the billionth time, Spam != advertising. When a company advertises, THEY cover the costs of the advertising. They buy the billboard and pay the guys to put their ad up on it. Spammers, on the other hand, use MY money, MY network and MY time to deliver advertisements to me. The reason spammers are able to break even is because they're using other people's resources to get their advert out. Besides, if the "common man" wanted your "mass-communication" everyone would be checking out www.viagra-adipex-free-teens-larger-wang.com instead of slashdot.

paying for email...

[andy55]

When it comes right down to it, heuristics and Bayesian filters and challenge/response systems do improve things from the point of view of the recipient, but not from the point of view of the IT group that has to support all this overhead. Ultimately, e-postage is probably the right way to go, but the costs (implementing the micropayment overhead, plus protocol changes, plus the human frustration) are prohibitive in the short run. Don't look for this in the next couple of years. Besides, people just hate the idea of paying for their e-mail.

A questionable set of assumptions. If you charged .01 cents an email, I don't think anyone would mind paying a cent for a hundred emails we sent out (if it meant no spam). To a spammer, such a cost suddenly makes bulk emailing not an option and they'd be screwed. I wouldn't mind an electronic analog of "junk" email in the way we get junk snail mail. It's not something I love, but legitimate companies do have legitimate goods and services. This is to say, I'd have no problems if "junk" email was 2-5 emails a day from medium/large legit companies containing various sales info.

Re:paying for email...

[herrvinny]

But what about mailing lists and whatnot operated by small organizations? Obviously they can't afford to pay 0.1 cents/email. I subscribe to the IETF mailing lists; those servers must send hundreds of thousands of emails a day. I doubt they would want to pay so much to provide a free discussion service, and then there's mailing lists operated by nonprofit orgs, charities, etc.

Re:paying for email...

[andy55]

But what about mailing lists and whatnot operated by small organizations?

Good point. Possible solution: perhaps there would be a mechanism such that to subscribe to such a list, you, the subscriber have to pay your .01 cent. I wouldn't mind and I think most people wouldn't either. Such an pay system would already have an authentication/signature system, so adding such a "reverse" mechanism would be a non-issue.

Re:paying for email...

[Anonymous Coward]

I still think that mailservers should use the PKI structure. Each new mailserver would require a public/private key pair. Each key could be signed by a prevoius key, leading up to one person (I'll vote Alan Cox, cause that guy knows his shit!).

He signs a bunch of keys, then those keys sign a bunch, and so on and so forth. Lookups would just simply walk the tree. You set the depth at which you'll receive e-mail from, and can elevate keys to top-level if you want, to avoid the headache of having subdomains or backup mail servers faulting for domains on the fringe.

Now spammers will have to get keys from trusted sources, which can be identified. Too many bad certs, and wham, lop the branch of the tree!

Re:paying for email...

[M. Silver]

then there's mailing lists operated by nonprofit orgs, charities, etc.

Speaking as one such (we're not an IRS-endorsed nonprofit, we just don't charge anything *or* serve ads), I have to say... at this point, charging for email isn't going to make a difference for us. We're already looking for alternative methods of serving our content... e-postage isn't going to ruin things any *more* than spam already has.

The Phoenyx spends a great deal of "staff" time and server horsepower (successfully) trying to keep spam off the mailing lists, but it's reaching the point where it's a losing fight... we have no time to add features, etc. because we're constantly tweaking settings to achieve that balance between making administration and usage easy for our users, detecting spam, not getting caught in users' spamfilters, and staying off blacklists (we were on Spamcop's blacklist a few hours yesterday despite all that).

So we're basically giving up. The Phoenyx has served email in one form or another since 1986, and we're not going to stop just yet... but we're going to offer all the alternatives we can (for the same content): a private NNTP server, a web forum (and despite being here, I despise web forums), and so on.

I predict that within a year, we'll have no email subscribers left. Definitely none among nontechnical folks.

Of course, that just means the fight will turn to trying to block web forum spammers, but it's easier to set up authentication on web forums, at least.

Re:paying for email...

[zeux]

I have a mailing list with 30000 people. Do I have to pay 0.01 cents an email ?

Re:paying for email...

[markov_chain]

Perhaps there should be a "deposit" charge for each message, which can be returned by the recipient if the message is legitimate, or withheld if the message is spam. That way, in your case, you would pay the deposit for each of the 30k messages, but it would eventually get returned.

Re:paying for email...

[plover]

I think that if you move the recipient of the money to the recipient of the email, the spam problem would completely disappear.

"So you want to send me advertising, and you're going to pay me $0.10 per message you email me? Send all you want, dude!"

But if that $0.10 per message just falls into the "Big AOL Pot O'Money(TM)", the whining would be louder than it is today.. "What, I'm paying for email and I STILL get spam? You said it'd be gone if I paid!!!"

Re:paying for email...

[MCZapf]

Spammers wouldn't pay anyway. They'd just pretend to be their own ISP (like some do even today) and, whatever the payment method is, they will spoof the part that says, "this sender payed for this email."

To prevent this, you'd have to verify payments for each email with a bank or perhaps some sort of Internet Post Office to issue, validate and cancel the "stamps." I highly doubt such an organization will be created.

Re:paying for email...

[RetroGeek]

If you charged .01 cents an email

Sure, 0.01 cents today.

Tommorrow, who knows how much. Once the infrastucture is in place, what is to prevent the price from going up?

Don't say competition, because just like gasoline, there will be a steadily increasing cost across all providers.

Re:paying for email...

[cybermace5]

Yup.

Ok, now guess who the government would put in charge of implementing this postage system? The U.S. Postal Service has lots of experience with postage...I'm willing to bet they'd get the job.

So, watch as they slap on a small postage fee per email. And then, mark my words, watch them offer a bulk rate for large mailings, just as they do now with snail mail. ;) It's too evil to not happen.

Wrong, wrong, wrong

[Smallpond]

Charging for email without securing the email infrastructure is a bad idea.

Spammers don't send mail from their computers, they send from your computer. Who gets the money from this micropayment? If its the recipient, guess what? All of the spam will be directed to the spammers from the hijacked computers. Instant Powerball jackpot winner. If the ISP gets it, guess what? All of the spammers will become ISPs.

Adding a new market force just changes the dynamics, it doesn't eliminate the crime.

I 'caught' a spammer once...

[blorg]

...and he completely took the attitude that it was my problem, that I should be paying for the measures to avoid spam. I had called him on his mobile phone, and asked him if he sent me that email. Yes, he said, are you interested in the product? I explained that it was spam, and his response was 'so what, why don't you install a filter'.

Well, the main health insurance company here has a helpful service that will send a text message to your mobile phone to remind you to take your contraceptive pill. My only regret was that 6am was the earliest time you could select for that reminder...

One question

[BiggerIsBetter]

Pay who, exactly?

Re:paying for email...

[DeadSea]

The economics of paying 0.01 cents per email makes it infeasable. The tracking, billing, and collection costs would far exceed the possible revenue. It could not be a sustainable system.

Look at the failure for any micropayment system to even get to the realm of being able to charge a penny at a time, let alone 1/100th that.

Prediction

[jefu]

I predict that if it comes to the point where we pay for email that personal email will be charged at something like $0.50 (fifty cents) per email (or more) and that organizations like AOL and MSN and Yahoo will be selling bulk email to companies at $0.01(one cent) per pop and we will hear endlessly about how they have to have the bulk email in order to support our personal email.

Charging for e-mail would be nice

[Sycraft-fu]

But really isn't feasable.

What I would like, supposing this could be done, is actually a higher charge, say $.10 per e-mail. Thing would be, if the recipient decided your e-mail was worth their time, they'd have the option to cancel the fee. So if you e-mail me for a good reason, I just cancel the charge, if not you pay. Add to that the ability to create white lists, so I can set senders that are always allowed to send me e-mail with no charge.

Something like that would work great at not only eliminating S

It just gets uglier and uglier

[erick99]

As spammers try to defeat filtering systems, they make their emails almost unreadable. On top of that, many of the emails I get from spammers seem to have been written by people who do not speak English as a first language. So, I get emails full of bizarre characters in extremely poorly written English with tons of grammatical errors. And I am going to send them my credit card number? I don't need my "organ" enlarged quite that badly.

Happy Trails!

Erick

Well, duh...

[herrvinny]

We've known this all the time. Spammers spam because it makes them money. Didn't we have a /. article a while back showing how big of a house a big-time spammer had, and giving all sorts of stats, e.g. foreign servers in China, Russia, etc spewing spam, three T1 lines, a network of computers in his basement, etc?

Yes, spammers spam to make money. But that doesn't make it legal. Robbers rob to make money, but stealing is illegal.

Re:Well, duh...

[DenOfEarth]

Yes, spammers spam to make money. But that doesn't make it legal. Robbers rob to make money, but stealing is illegal.

To be philosophical about it, just because it's illegal doesn't make it wrong, it just means you can get punished for it.

However, in a practical sense, spamming and spammers are not an easy thing to track down either. The open nature of the internet means we have to put up with this stuff until someone figures out a technical solution. I think it's pretty much impossible to legislate anything with any kind of impact onto this internet deal. Even if it were possible to legislate terms of internet usage in one country, the thing is so entrenched with global connections that we'd have a hard time stopping people from settuing up shop in some other place.

Gimme an open internet over a heavily regulated one anyday...it's the information super-highway, not the information trolley.

This does not compute

[FreemanPatrickHenry]

As long as spammers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to spam. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.'"

I don't follow. Responding to "market forces" (and God knows I'm an ESR-esque capitalist) doesn't give you the right to invade my privacy. Arguably, the mafia responds to market forces. Extortion is "rational behavior in the economic sense." Your point being?

The point is...

[sczimme]

that you don't understand the premise.

"In the economic sense" means you look at the problem purely from the economic standpoint. Not the legal, not the ethical, not the moral - the economic. Just the economic.

Think of it as functioning in a world of just economics without outside forces like law and morality. Things that make sense - i.e. that will make money - are good, period. However, these ideas tend to lose their appeal when acted on by outside forces - i.e. the aforementioned law and morality. You rolled law and morals into your assessment of a model that does not address them.

Re:This does not compute

[Mr_Silver]

Responding to "market forces" (and God knows I'm an ESR-esque capitalist) doesn't give you the right to invade my privacy.

Your privacy hasn't been invaded. You've set up an email address which is the equivilant of installing a letter box in your house door and inviting people to post stuff through it.

No email address, no entry point. But you have one and now you're upset because the people that are coming through the door aren't people that you want.

Email is all or nothing. You either accept that by having an email account you will receive everyting that is sent that address or you don't have one.

If you want to add filters at your end, then that is your call - but to think that you can dictate who can and can't use your email address to *try* and send you something is laughibly impossible.

Sorry, it just doesn't work that way. Sucks, but thats the way it is.

From a purely economical point of view...

[Xeth]

Plenty of crimes (Drug dealing, fraud, plain 'ol theft) make sense. That doesn't mean they're morally acceptable.

Economy?

[Savage-Rabbit]

"... the economic forces that have led to the spam problem ..."

That is an easy one:

Greed+Stupidity=Spammer

Adv:

[lcde]

I never understood what was wrong with making spam okay (to a point) as long as they have an Adv: in the subject line. This still allows other people to get it, along with an easy way to filter.

Re:Adv:

[lambadomy]

There is nothing wrong with it, there is just no motivation for the spammers to go along with it, so it would never happen. Trying to enforce that would be just as futile as trying to enforce CAN-SPAM.

no fucking duh, Mr Allman

[bratgrrl]

"The problem is that our approach to the solution has also been short-term thinking. We have to think long-term. We have to make the spammers pay more than we do."

My dear sir, the problem has been more than adequately defined a MEEEELYUN times at least. I was hoping for a solution, not another whiny 'spammers do it 'cause it's so cheap' rant. Like that's news. :P

Spam is Theft and Therefore Always Wrong

[Rude Turnip]

While spam benefits spammers, it steals man-hours and network resources from companies who would rather put their personnel and equipment to more productive (and profitable uses). Spam is the collect call that you're forced to accept.

Economic Morality

[nil5]

There are many things which are clearly "wrong" and which, therefore are not "right" regardless of the cause. I really don't think that "market forces" are a justification for filling your mailbox with as many penis-enlargment or "generic male enhancing formula" ads as possible.

Seriously, sometimes there are forces which drive me to run nearby vehicles off the road whilst on the freeway, but I find the human capacity to control myself for the greater good. Why can't we ask the same for spammers? Because they face absolutely no punishment or cost for their actions.

Making an argument in favor o Microsoft

[rcastro0]

The point of the whole article can be summed up, IMHO, in the paragraph below:

Ultimately we have to reassign costs from the recipient back to the sender. Such costs can be artificial (e.g., e-postage) or fundamental (e.g., slowing down SMTP connections, perhaps by adding authentication overhead).

So, he is actually making an argument for one of Microsoft's projects: The Penny Black Project [microsoft.com].

Idiots!

[SisyphusShrugged]

I am sorry, anyone who responds to penile-enlargement ads, or nigerian scams, or any sort of other spam is a complete and utter moron.

I dont know why anyone out there would do this, especially given the poor quality of the advertisements sent out via email by the spammers....

Ahh..but as Monsieur Barnum said, "A Sucker is Born Every Minute"....it was true then and it is true now, there are people out there too stupid to live!

And in response to a previous post, at least drug dealers and embezzlers require a modicum of intelligence, the haphazard style of the spammers indicates they have none.

For those who don't know Willie

[sootman]

Willie "The Actor" Sutton was a bank robber. His claim to fame is that someone asked him "Why do you rob banks?" and his answer was "Because that's where the money is."

That didn't say much...

[NitroWolf]

Well... I RTFA and that article didn't go anywhere.

He says there's a spam problem (no kidding?) and that the economics of it are viable (Well, no kidding? Is that why we continue to receive spam?) and there's no way to stop it without incuring an overhead in transmission (either through permission based, authentication or challenge and response) - well... we already knew that through 100's of /. postings and personal experiences.

So what was the point of the article? To just rehash the same old situation?

We need a solution, not a restatement of the problem. The solution is going to involve more overhead, because the fundamental problem with SMTP is the touted low overhead itself. There's no real authentication and anyone can send anything to anyone else. THAT is the problem, so of COURSE we are going to have to have more overhead in a "new" SMTP protocol of some sort if we want to affect a change. This is just a given.

The focus needs to be on coming up with a system to track the responsible parties (for good or ill) - and that will cost overhead. We'll have to suck it up, but it's the way it's going to have to be, unless we want to continue on the road we are on now.

It does make economic sense.

[Chess_the_cat]

Spammers don't make money by selling their products, they make money by selling addresses to each other. [wired.com]

The Al Capone defence...

[MosesJones]

If I hadn't made money from it I wouldn't have done it.

It made "economic sense" to kill DiLivio as if he had gone to the cops I'd have gone to prison.

It makes "economic sense" to cook the books like Enron as you get rich, all you are doing is using the market and obeying basic forces.

It makes "economic sense" to use slave and child labour, its cheaper, all you are doing is obeying basic market forces.

Oh and Guns don't kill people... number of deaths as a result of "drive by Sarcasm hits" still at zero however.

A different solution

[bobthemuse]

Spammers spam because it is profitable. Companies hire spammers because it brings them in money. 95% of the spam I receive is illegal (forged headers, no opt-out,etc). I wonder if we could petition Visa/MasterCard to have a process for cutting off the merchant accounts when there is evidence of illegal spam. Then it would no longer be profitable to hire spammers.

I wonder if the PR coup would be enough to offset the money lost from spammers transactions.

And its rational to buy from spammers too. :(

[G4from128k]

Not to defend spam, but this issue of economic rationality applies to the recipients of spam too. For too many people, the cost of searching for a product exceeds the cost of clicking through a spam email. HTML email and the internet have made it too easy for the recipients of marketing material to satisfy their curiosity (and buy) from spam. In contrast, taking the initative, opening up a web page to Google, searching for a product, and reserach company reputations is too much bother for too many people.

I suspect that many people see spam-promoted products as no more disreputable than companies found by a search, so why not buy from the most convenitent channel? There may even be a perverse psychological drive that favors spam. If you get screwed by a company that you actively searched for and selected, then you feel like a complete idiot. If you get screwed by a spam compnay, then you can (at least psychologically) partially blame the company that sought you out.

As long as it is easier to click through a spam to reward a spammer (and people are lazy), spammers will be rewarded.

Uhh.. isn't that obvious?

[arvindn]

IMHO, the rant doesn't say anything new. We all know SMTP is fundamentally broken; a permanent solution to spam would require discarding or significantly modifying it. And defending an economic model doesn't mean justifying the ethics of it. Eolas has a sound money making scheme, does that mean we like them?

The email system (and bandwidth on the internet in general) is sort of like communism. Things are fine if everyone behaves themselves and respects others' rights etc. It can work well for small communities. But obviously humans are greedy. So when the internet grows big you get into all these problems. Laws make the problem worse, because if you outlaw an economically sound model you start seeing the totalitarian side of communism.

Could we have designed a mail protocol which cannot be abused in this way? Sure: mails are kept on a server for which the sender pays until the receiver decides whether or not to view it (or a timeout elapses). Just the reverse of SMTP. I won't go into the details, it has been discussed at length on /. before. But is it practically feasible at this stage to switch to such a system? That's an entirely different question.

Spam is killing itself

[workindev]

I can see SPAM killing itself in the not-to-distant future. SPAM is a numbers game, and it used to be that they could get very small response rate and still make money if they sent out a large volume of mail.

Now, everybody is assaulted with countless email messages, mostly peddling the same products. As people get more and more SPAM, the response rate will inevitably drop lower and lower, and I believe it will eventually bring in too little money to justify the costs that spammers incur to send it out.

My public email address will have 100% junk email on some days. I read 0% of those emails beyond the subject line. 3 years ago, when it was only 10-20%, I at least had a chance of actually viewing the message as I was sorting my mail.

Well, duh...

[Steve B]

We have to make the spammers pay more than we do.

All it takes is to bust a few of them under existing laws, and make sure the other inmates find out "he's in here for showing dirty pictures to little girls".

Rational?

[Noryungi]

Here is Rational Economic Sense to you:
(cut to the 'GodFather' set -- small smoky room in the middle of nowhere)

Godfather (in a very breathy voice): Guido, I know you like that little spam business of yours, but I am gonna make youse an offer you can't refuse...

Spammer (badly bruised up and tied to a chair between two very tall and muscular men): Yes, Don Corleone?

Godfather: You stop that little racket of yours -- the one that sends me insulting emails about my manhood size -- or you are going to find yourself in a trashcan in the toilets of Grand Central Station. All 600 little pieces of you. Is that economically rational to ya or what?

Spammer: Su... Sure, Don Corleone...

Godfather: Good boy. See? I just knew ya were going to like my deal! (pats spammer on the cheek)

(Godfather stands up and exits the small smoky room . A group of even bigger tough guys are waiting outside.)

Godfather (talking to no-one in particular): As soon as he has erased his hard disk, chop him up in a thousand pieces and drop the remains in the toilets of Grand Central Station. Then, kill all his family and business associates, chop *them* up and throw the pieces in the Hudson.

(Godfather enters his long black limo)

Godfather: Increase my penis size! Sheesh, you don't get no respect these days...

Well, what about heroin dealers?

[kahei]

Dealing heroin, they take in more money than they lose. Does that mean we sigh and say 'Ah, such are the wonders of market forces'?

People who beat up little old ladies and take their purses also take in more money than they lose. Do we blame it all on market forces or do we send them to jail? We send them to jail.(*)

Just because something makes a profit doesn't mean it's not bad. The fact that this needs pointing out to anyone is pretty fucking sad.

(*) Except in the UK, but that's an anomaly.

Comments..

[tjansen]

• Increasing the cost for the sender works only with real money. All the computing time or bandwidth approaches wont work. The reason is that are far too many too cheap ways to acquire non-monetary resources: hack computers (using trojans, worms, whatever) so they provide computing time, make people pay for porn with computing time etc... money will work, as long as the potential profit is lower than the cost for sending the mail
  
• permission-based mail can't be a general solution. Just like anybody can look up you telephone number or send you paper mail, you also want that for email. (Not everybody of course, but many people).
  

spam email factories and MLM

[Speare]

I have a strong suspicion that most of the little-guy spam email factories are really just suckered into an industry with the same structure as Mary Kay Cosmetics, Herbalife, Tupperware, Avon, and many other multilevel marketing systems (aka MLMs).

It starts with shit-on-a-stick advertising. You know, the handbills and placards on street corners, or on your company breakroom bulletin board. Somebody reads this junk and thinks they can finally have a job which doesn't require much time and lets them raise their rugrats too. The advertising doesn't say what it IS, it says a lot about what it ISN'T. No selling. No parties (unless you want). No data entry. Use the computer you've got. Some will mention MLM pyramid buzzwords, like "grow your organization," and "get your friends involved with your new company."

Now, in many fraudulent MLMs, you have to pay a fee for a starter kit from your advertising contact. The only difference between a legal MLM and an illegal Ponzi investment scheme is the "product." If you actually schlep skin-cream or candles, you *theoretically* can make back your starter investment without growing a downline organization of other suckers.

You can buy other aids from your advertising contact if you find yourself floundering. Buy a CD-ROM with more email addresses. "Validated." Finally, if you don't think you can possibly sell that much product personally, the only way to escape without major losses is to put out some cheap advertising on your own, asking your friends to get into the act. That's right. Sucker other people to join the organization, so they can share in the same bad investment you originally made.

Spam email "product" would just be the opportunity advertising space itself, which marketing majors will tell you is seen as inventory. The fun thing about email "advertising space" is that it isn't really accountable. You can just run spiders to comb more databases to create more advertising space. Those who get some technical savvy will figure out how to work around a spam filter, and then you can start to build your own library of "validated" addressing space, ready for delivery.

The only way to break apart an illegal MLM is to find the organizing agents of each illegal MLM, and pound them into the dirt legally. Upper tiers are usually found to be defrauding their downline agents, through misleading buy-in advertising. Then prosecute every downline until the roots are too small to grow back on their own. Of course, if they legally have a "product" like "advertising space," and they're careful about how they phrase their recruiting pitches, it's going to be hard to prosecute effectively with today's laws.

Ethics, not economics

[prgrmr]

Spamming is an ethical issue at its heart. Using open relays, using individuals' computers to forward mail, and other uses of bandwith that the spammers aren't paying for is at the least dishonest, and moreso argueably theft.

There is also the consideration that freedom of speach by definition includes freedom from speach, so we shouldn't have to be subjected to the spam in the first place.

Switch to Pull instead of Push

[bradm]

(Yes, I'm going to handwave over the details. Some of you smart folks can figure out how to make this work).

1. Accept SMTP messages only from known senders (whitelist)
   
2. Extend SMTP to allow receipt of pointers to messages housed elsewhere. Apply blacklists to this feature.
   
3. Extend POP3/IMAP/your choice to allow one-time pickup of a message (the pointer accepted earlier) by a remote recipient.
   
4. Extend MUAs to do one time pickup, and update whitelist / blacklists. Allow application of autofiltering here if the user wants.
   

Why do the above? It forces the spammer to house the mail instead of the recipient. If it is a spam, there's a good chance the sending site will be blacklisted before many of the recipients ever receive it.

Not perfect, but it changes the economic balance in the right direction without payment schemes.

Explanation does not constitute excuse

[sacrilicious]

The sad point of all of this is that I'm going to (sort of) defend the spammers and point out that they are responding to basic economic forces that we all respond to at one level or another.

Responding to economic forces does not in any way exempt anyone from being subject to moral and ethical evaluations.

If I mug people for money and manage to get away with it, that doesn't constitute a defense of any substantive kind. Yes my behavior can be *explained* motivationally by economics, but for someone to therefor be emotionally conflicted as to whether or not I should be condemned for it would be - to put it kindly - absurd.

Now if the alternative for spammers was to starve to death, that would cast this in a different light. But that's not the case. Spammers are people who could have chosen to go to work doing something useful, and instead decided to pollute the commons.

Its not so much the spam but the volume of spam!

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

Okay, accepting that everyone has a right to try to make a living, but the thing that irritates me most about spam is that I'll get the same email 6 times in one day to the same address!

So unlike snail-mail based junk mail where the costs ensure the sender will only bother to "spam" me once a month, email spammers abuse the system.

If they'd just behave a little more sensably then I'd have more simpathy/empathy.

The other thing that annoys me is the content of some of the emails. It really isn't right sending out explicit email when you don't know anything about who's receiving the email.... seriously, some of the spammers should be hung, drawn and quarters for the sh*t they send out.

Getting back to the "volume" problem, this will eventually force the spammers out of business, as it will continue to increase and force changes to the email system. It would therefore make sense for spammers to draw up some kind of unofficial code of conduct, e.g. clean their email lists of dupes and "webmaster" and "abuse" addresses, etc, and only send any given "advert" to a single address once every... month preferably, but if they restricted themselves to once a week it would still be a vast improvement.

I can't see that this would be at all difficult for a spammer and I can't see that it would make any difference to the volume of business generated... I mean, there ain't no way I'm going to order viagra 6 times a day anyway!!

It's easy but....

[gr8_phk]

It is simple to make the spammers pay. Use challenge response - not for identity verification, just to make them burn some CPU time. CPU time is usually not considered a cost, but it could be significant to a spammer. Some time is also burned by the recipient, but we can change the balance in our favor as well. "Here, factor this number and I'll accept your mail." Simple. It does cost something from the recipient, but it's imbalanced in our favor. There is one more big big problem to solve before this can really work: Most people get their mail from an ISP mail server. This means the ISP is going to pay the cost on the receiving end no mater how small. Worse yet, those who insist on fondling your outbound mail will pay both prices. Naturally we need to reach the point where we handle our own personal mail before these costs truely don't affect people, and that requires everyone to have an IP address, and that requires IPV6... And there you have it, IPV6 is an enabler to stop the spam problem.

Just because it's not illegal...

[KC7GR]

Just because spamming is not illegal (and it is, under an increasing number of laws) under some conditions does not make it morally or ethically "right." It is still theft by conversion and trespass to chattel. The court system decided that a lonnnng time back in the original case of Cyber Promotions vs. AOL. [epic.org]

Muggers, shoplifters, and other thieves are not going to go away as long as they think they have even the ghost of a chance of making a quick $$.

Spamming is not going to go away as long as spammers think they can make an equally quick $$.

Spamming would stop practically overnight if the entire Internet-using population simply failed to respond to ANY of the offers contained in spam, no matter if they came from a supposedly "legitimate" company (and, in my eyes, no company that sends any form of spam can be considered "legitimate") or some huckster in a double-wide in a trailer park.

The answer, to my eyes, is two-fold, and is simple enough.

(1) Extend the existing anti-junk FAX laws [keytlaw.com] to cover E-mail. In other words, ban spamming outright. Period.

(2) Teach people early and well, especially the earlier generation: NEVER RESPOND to spam, other than to block or filter it.

Muggers simply respond to economic forces

[Elladan]

Working for a living, even with those annoying advanced degrees, costs a significant amount of time and effort. I've seen claims that acquiring a single job through direct application costs close to $100. And that's not considering the 40 hours a week one must spend at the job. Doing a job that pays poorly is inefficient, so workers limit the number of jobs they do to the highest paying they can find.

But suppose it costs you essentially nothing to make a buck through mugging. Then your best strategy to maximize profits is to mug as many people as you can find. After all, if you're mugging mortgage financiers, there might actually be some money in their pockets. You would miss those potential money sources if you trimmed your list. Perhaps some folks who have expressed interest in designer beer mugs are also walking in your area. If you did the "rational" thing you and didn't hit them over the head with a sand-filled sock, you would miss them, and it costs you nothing, right?

The sad point of all of this is that I'm going to (sort of) defend the muggers and point out that they are responding to basic economic forces that we all respond to at one level or another. As long as muggers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to beat people senseless and take their money. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.

Don't blame the buyers

[jdavidb]

Everyone always says that as long as there are people willing to buy this product, spamming will continue. Well, looking at the products advertised by spam, I have trouble believing anyone buys these products.

I don't believe the problem is that spamming successfully brings in new customers. I believe the problem is that spammers sell their service to unsuspecting "businesses" that believe whatever phony lines they are handing them about how it will be good for their business. As long as there are small businesses who believe this, spammers will find a market for their services and spam will continue, even if the premise that spam has a nonzero response rate is untrue. Eventually as it becomes commonly accepted knowledge that businesses are not successful with this type of advertising, spam should drop off.

SMTP IS BROKEN

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, I just don't buy it. Screw economics.

The bottom line Allman is NOT addressing is SMTP IS A BROKEN PROTOCOL. Spamming happens because it is EASY TO DO and it takes more effort to stop it.

SMTP was designed in an era where internet hosts implicitly trusted each other (this same era gave us the horribly insecure TELNET and FTP as well). That era is LONG LONG GONE.

The reality is that SMTP headers are too easy to forge. We will NEVER be free of open relays--this is the fault of the protocol as much as the clueless admins. SMTP needs to be completely replaced.

Look--you can still get spam-free email. Just not over SMTP. Believe it or not, FIDONET still exists and guess what--I don't get any spam there. Why? Because the system would smash down anyone that tried rather quickly--the protocol works. I've been encouraging anyone who will listen to jump back on one of the many FIDONET or Citadel BBS systems available on the internet for decent, spam-free email.

Pay for email?

[Kraegar]

What the hell is up with the notion that we should have to pay to email? Even the 0.1 cent idea... Converting the world of email over to a new system would cost the industry a huge amount, and then suddenly the chosen anonynymity I have in email is gone ([e-mail] for a mailing list can now be tracked to me)...

As the article says, spammers send spam because they make money at it. The solution presented is one we've heard many times... charge for email and make it less profitable.

Why not go after the source? Go after the companies that are advertising via spam? Track them down, follow the links they send, follow the trail, and jail them. Fine them. Make them pay.

If the spammers are making money off of spam, that money has to lead somewhere. Follow it to the source, and deal with the source.

The infrastructure for micropayments on email would be insane considering that (most?) every country in the world would have to back it, there would be a huge amount of tracking and auditing to be done, and a fairly seamless cutover for millions of companies would have to happen... Yeah, right.

he couldn't have made it any more obvious

[CAIMLAS]

urg, he couldn't have made this any more obvious. Imagine he was a company selling sendmail: what would they try and do? They'd try and make it look like they weren't the ones responsible for the spam, as they'd have money (in his case, ego) on the line.

The problem here is a fundamental flaw in smtp.

The solution here is to redesign smtp. Even something as simple as a 'trusted peer server' model would work and wouldn't need a complete redesign: each server is the trusted peer of several others (say 5, and all would have to be fqdn). After mail is sent, and before that mail is delivered, the server it is sent from is validified to be a peer (by doing a quick check on the 5 servers that it claims are its peers). If the server sent from doesn't have peers, then the mail isn't delivered.

While this wouldn't completely trap all spam, and some spam would certainly still get through from exploited networks, it would make the job of maintaining accurate RBLs much, much easier, and would functionally run spammers out of business, if (say) the next sendmail version were to impliment the feature, and people started using it.

Economically speaking, Eric Aldman is wrong.

[stomv]

His buildup is fine, but his conclusion is off by a mile and a half.

Firstly, he claims that our bandwidth and disk space aren't free... welp, he's right, but only barely. The marginal cost of the additional disk space, CPU cycles, bandwidth, etc is virtually zero, but certainly positive. Yet then he claims that a spammer's costs are zero. What about their computers? Email addresses? Bandwidth? Hard drive space? Those certainly aren't less costly than the same types of resources for each individual recipient.

But, more to the point -- why filters will make reduce spam by effecting the marketplace:

1. The filters have forced the spammers to degrade their own salespitch. By being forced to include extra characters, poor spelling, lousy grammar, etc in an effort to circumvent filters, they are serving to reduce their own credibility. By doing so, they are making their advertising less likely to attract any particular customer. Therefore, their response rate of the folks who might respond to spam is reduced, making spam less profitable.

2. By making spam filters more and more effective and easy to administer, they will find their way to more and more people's mail clients. For many of the new adoptees of filters, it won't be because the new users sought out the filter; it will be simply because the filter was part of the email program they happen to be using. Some of these folks are in the set of "spam-responders", that is, folks that might respond to spam. So, as filters proliferate, they will end up filtering spam away from potential customers -- again, reducing response rates and hence profitibility of spammers.

So, there's two ways where spam filters will reduce overall levels of spam by using the powers of economics against the spammer. Reduce the liklihood that somebody will respond to a spammed message by reducing it's quality, and reduce the liklihood that a potential customer will even see the email in the first place. Sure, the recipient will bear some costs in the short term, but the long term results will be less and less spam overall.

How to stop spam, if Congress had any backbone

[Animats]

Stopping spam is easy. Make banks who issue merchant accounts liable for spam by their customers.

This would work. First, you can always find the bank handling the transaction. Just put in a credit card number and watch where the transaction comes from in the credit card system.

Second, banks have strong merchant agreements with companies that accept credit cards, agreements that allow the bank to charge back transactions. So banks can enforce anti-spam terms of service on their customers. Once this gets into the regulations of Visa International and MasterCard, it's enforceable worldwide through the credit card infrastructure.

Third, the seller/spammer always knows, when the transaction goes through, where the customer is. So they are liable in the customer's jurisdiction, not the spammer's. If spam laws differ in different jurisdictions, the seller can block transactions from areas with strong anti-spam laws. Of course, if they have to block most of the developed world, they won't make any money, which makes spamming go away.

SPAM and organised crime...

[mseeger]

Hi,

i think a much overlooked fact is, that Spam is moving towards organised crime. Currently we have several trends working that way:

• People who are sending Spam are getting stigmatised. They become or already are people at the border of the civic community. Those people are feeling less bound by written or unwritten laws.
• More and more countries are adopting legal measures against Spam. If it isn't illegal already, it will be soon.
• Spam advertises less and less real products or services (excluding cybersex). If you should ever try to order the Viagra through one of those offers, you're in for a surprise (and a hefty credit card invoice).
• The margins on Spam are high, if you have the nerves to do it. Compare this to drugs...
• The criminal energy used to distribute Spam is increasing. Already several Viruses/Worms have been written and distributed (probably) by the Spam community.
• A lot of Spam advertises comercial sex, an area where organised crime is strong already.

I think a lot of people look at Spam as a kind of nuisance. It is more. If the observed trends continue, we'll find Spam sent by those same friendly guys who offer the heroin to your kids. No joke or rethoric intended, i'm plain serious on that one. Take a look at Sobig, the backdoors it opened and what kind of Spam and how fast you got it.

Regards, Martin

False economics

[tverbeek]

Based on the level of ineptitude behind so much spam of the spam I receive (e.g. "Dear USERNAME...", incompatible charsets, sales pitches so unreadable that a 1-in-6Gpeople response rate seems optimistic), I'm not sure that spammers as a class can be described as "rational" (even in mercantile terms). That's assuming a level of analysis that they don't even seem capable of.

I think a lot of the actual practitioners of spam are simply id10ts who've been duped into believing that the economics of it are in their favor. ("Look at how many people are doing it!" "They said on TV that it doesn't cost hardly nothing"). So they buy mailing lists, spamware, etc. from folks dealing in such stuff... as Make Money Fast! scams. Spammers don't necessarily last very long individually; they seem so persistent only because of the ongoing supply of suckers.

If so, it isn't the cost/benefit of spamming that keeps the crap flowing, but the cost/benefit of selling spamming. It's not the open relays out there that are the problem, but the open (slack-jawed) mouths.

In (sort of) defense of cocaine

[The Master Control P]

The sad point of all of this is that I'm going to (sort of) defend the cocaine dealers and point out that they are responding to basic economic forces that we all respond to at one level or another. As long as coke dealers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to sell cocaine. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.

The sad point of all of this is that I'm going to (sort of) defend the child pornographers and point out that they are responding to basic economic forces that we all respond to at one level or another. As long as child pornographers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to rape children. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.

The fact is, engaging in kiddie porn, drug dealing, and spamming requires more than a profit incentive; It also requires a complete lack of any moral compass whatsoever, which we all agree that the three groups above do.

I am quite frankly amazed that no one has shot Richter or Ralsky in the head with a large-caliber shotgun yet. Once THAT happens, the tide of spam will turn.

At any rate, I could argue that they are NOT responding to basic market forces; Before spam inundated our inboxes, did any one want to be carpet bombed with offers to "3n14rge yur ===) and (.)?" NO. At a point in the not so distant past, the ratio of gullible morons on the internet reached a high enough value that it became profitable to defraud them en masse. When everyone but the aforementioned candidates for "You Are A Fucking Moron 9" (google for it) took offense, the spammers did the same thing America did in Vietnam: Step up the carpet bombing; You've got to hit one eventually, regardless of the number of innocents you hit in the process.

Re:crime

[Dr. Bent]

In an economic sense, yes.

If the cost of the lawyers he has to pay for, the lost time spent in jail, and the other costs associated with the activity are less than the gain (resulting in a net profit of sufficent size), then from an economic standpoint it is a rational career path. Remember, the 'Willie Sutton Principle' is named after a bank robber.

Whether or not it's a moral career path is an entirely different issue.

Re:crime

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but you forgot an important factor. If the person is truly rational, they will use the following formula:

Expected Gain = (Gain from burglary) - [(Probability of being caught) * (Estimated monetary cost of penalty)] - (Opportunity Cost)

Opportunity cost is important - my opportunity cost is high, for example, since the next best option for me is my current job, which pays well, has health beenfits, etc. For someone with only a GED, though, it is significantly lower.

the estimated monetary cost being caught is a value assigned to the penalty (i.e., how much is it worth to me to stay out of jail).

Given that formula, a truly rational person will burgle whenever the Expected Gain is greter than 0.

Re:so?

[Snowmit]

As long as spammers can take in more money than it costs them, they will continue to spam. This is "rational" behavior in the economic sense.

I don't follow. Responding to "market forces" (and God knows I'm an ESR-esque capitalist) doesn't give you the right to invade my privacy. Arguably, the mafia responds to market forces. Extortion is "rational behavior in the economic sense." Your point being?

His point being "The problem is that our approach to the solution has also been short-term thinking. We have to think long-term. We have to make the spammers pay more than we do." I know, I know, reading the WHOLE article is very hard. Congratulations on your +4 Insightful.

Re:READ THIS. Market Economics Solution to Spam

[Cryacin]

Sorry, forgot to tag my paragraphs.

It is quite easy to get rid of spam. This is what I do:

1. Receive Piece of spam regarding penis enlargement. Sent to junk mail, or doesn't go through my spam filter.

2. When I get a few minutes, and I'm rather pissed off at something, I pull up one of my default response templates. Ie, received E-Mail of Penis enlargement pill/patch/voodoo dance, and simply send an E-Mail back saying:

"Hi, I'm interested in your penis enlargement patch. Please send me some information on your product."

3. Wait for response to mail

4. Send another appropriate but stupid question to them, never actually purchasing.

5. Repeat step 3 if a further E-Mail has been sent to me.

Some interesting things I have noted:

1. My spam has decreased. The spammers are not all stupid and they blacklist my E-Mail address. (From 400 mails a day, down to about 50)

2. And this is the big one. It costs a small, tiny fraction of a cent to send out a generic spam advertisement. Therefore, easy or genuine responses are economically viable, as they only get a few a day.

Now just imagine, if we have the force of a fraction of a few dedicated /. readers. Perhaps about 100,000 of them sending on average 5 generic responses per day. That's 500,000 E-Mails to the evil inboxes of doom.

Let's say that 1 company gets 70,000 bogus E-Mails in a day. It still takes approximately 1-2 mins to read and respond adequately to a person if they want to make a potential sale.

Thats between 70,000 and 140,000 minutes a day. That's about 1,167 to 2,333 work hours a day to respond to the junk they get back to perhaps glean 100 real potentials from their campaign.

If you need to pay an employee just $10 an hour, that's still between $11,670 and $23,330 a day.

That's between $4,259,550 and $8,519,100 that the spammers have to pay in work hours.

Now, lets say that they make about $2,000 a day from the 100 e-mails they get that are legit. They are now running at a loss.

Reading only the subject lines and filtering out the 'non-genuine' responses will result in REAL reasponses being filtered out as well, making their profits drop.

As the article said, they are using basic market economic forces to make a profit. We can use basic market economic forces to reduce the spam.

Summary:

1. Responding to spam has reduced my Junk mail, probably due to blacklisting. (This is only me, and I am only stating what has happened in my case.)

2. If enough people respond with fake letters of interest, the spammers go broke, and it becomes non-profitable.

So a call to arms /. ers. You hate spam? Me too. Let's do something about it.

CRyACin

If life gives you shit, then sell fertiliser - Bayani Portier