Misc. Ramblings

There have been various schemes to reduce or stop the number of unsolicited junk e-mails we all receive. But if it were something easy to do, it would have been solved by now.

Many people think passing laws against spam will stop it but fall silent when asked how US laws would be enforced in Nigeria, Russia, or China. But as PBS columnist Robert X. Cringely (see his column on spam here) says, the most efficient answer (other than shooting a few spammers - ed.), is an economic one.

For example, you don't get as much unsolicited snail mail (other than from credit card companies) because it costs a lot of money to have it delivered to your door. Hence, marketeers have to focus their mailing to people they think will actually buy their product or service.

Cringely argues that we could setup a system in which e-mail is filtered and held unless the sender is either in your address book (thus having your explicit consent to send you e-mail) or is willing to pay, through PayPal, some amount of cold, hard cash. The money received, if any, could be split between you and the service performing the filtering.

As with all schemes, there are problems. Suppose you buy something from sharperimage.com and they send a confirmation e-mail to you. How would you know what the e-mail address they would be sending from would be (so you could add it to your address book in advance)? Yes, you could set the amount that they would have to pay to some small amount, perhaps equal to the cost of a stamp, but what if they don't want to pay?

Well, okay, this problem could be solved by companies indicating the address they will be sending from so you can add them to your list but that solves only half the problem. What if you want to send an e-mail to someone that doesn't already have your address in their list - for example, a governmental agency that you need information from, would you be willing to pay to have your e-mail delivered? Maybe. Maybe not.

The net effect of this solution is to transform the Internet from being free to something you pay for. Perhaps this is a Good Thing and perhaps it isn't. But I can't think of a more efficient solution to reduce spam. The question is, is the solution more onerous than the problem? You decide.