Spam 101

Everywhere it elicits strong emotions.

Either your a victim, or you're making money off of it. Is there a valid use of spam? Is there an ethical argument to support this cancer of the internet? I have to say maybe to both questions. Like most people, I hate spam. I can remember 5 or 6 years ago, receiving only a few pieces of spam in my inbox every few days. These days, I receive upwards of 50 day, which is probably less than what a lot of people have to go through. I think there must be some valid use for spam. It wouldn't be so bad if the spammers didn't need to cheat to get the messages into the inbox. Then again, it would be much easier to block the crap if they didn't cheat. Ideally (at least in my mind), bulk e-mailers shouldn't need to send their spam anonymously or fraudulently. Most of the people who receive it, and just going to delete it anyways and get pissed off.
Why bother even trying to get the spam into their inbox? There are two types of people who fall for spam: people who are genuinely interested in what is being advertised, and poor saps who don't know what they're doing.

There's a big contradiction with regards to spam and privacy. Many people are rightfully scared of making private information public on the internet. No one really wants to give away demographic information for fear that they will be spammed by marketers. I've got news for you: That's how marketing operates, by trying to target advertising to people who will want to buy the product in question. Unfortunately, this paradigm failed. Now, the only economically viable way of performing e-mail advertisement is by sending it out by the millions, and hope that .01% out there follow through and buy your product. With modern spammers, there is no attempt to cultivate the client/vendor relationship. In an ideal world, we would only get commercial e-mail for products that we as consumers in specific demographics would conceivably want to buy. Also ideally, we wouldn't get so much of it. Unfortunately, we've missed the boat for this. The ideal situation is unattainable, and I am willing to bet that spam will probably continue in the format in which we know it now for several years to come at least.

Laws may make a difference. Unfortunately, the only remedies that I believe will work will be economic in nature, as opposed to legal. Charging a flat charge for every e-mail could do this. Better (or worse) still would be to charge internet users for bandwidth use, instead of providing it on a flat rate basis. That would get everyone re-thinking how they use their internet time. Imagine if your internet usage was metered just like water, electricity or gas. That would bring up some privacy issues, but let's try not to think of internet usage that way. In many ways, it's just another utility. As long as bandwidth is plentiful, I seriously doubt that there can be much done about this. We're stuck like this until all the excess capacity is wrung out of the fibre optic grid that spans the world. Also, the ISPs would have charge a pretty steep price to curtail spam, a price that I doubt as a society we are willing to pay.

Why do I think that laws will fail to curtail spam? Laws have physical limits. Outside of the jurisdiction of the government that has passed the law, the law has no effect. We may manage to curtail the spammers around us, but new ones will pop up in other countries. Imagine if North Korea got into the spamming business. It already sells illegal narcotics and WMD technology (but that's another topic to come up...), what could be done then. No international accord could stem the tide of spam.

Does that leave us without hope then? Well, we'll see. I will talk about this subject again in future.