To a certain extent, we rely on some parts of life staying at a manageable level on their own. We don't expect to come home to a mail box buried under a mountain of letters. We don't expect to have the telephone ring literally non-stop all day. We have, however, come to accept that an email inbox will be totally overflowing with spam. If there's just way too much of that, even with the best spam filtering software the address becomes useless because of the perfectly normal hit-and-miss ratio. You'll get a few false negatives (unfiltered spam in your inbox) and a few false positives (real mail in your spam filter). A false positive in an address swamped by spam will not be found because we don't have time or patience to sift through a thousand spams looking for one potential real mail. I don't even look any more. If Yahoo have shunted a real message to my spam folder, I'll never see it.
I shouldn't be, but I'm surprised that the problem of spam exists at all. It's a people problem on both sides. The spammer is greedy and the victim is under-educated. The technology enables a decent economic return because email is so cheap and people do respond.
Mokalus of Borg
PS - Yeah, people are buying things from spam.
PPS - Lots and lots of people.
2 comments:
There in lies the problem for the average punter; the business probably only needs one single sale per million, to justify the cost of the mailout.
Until there is an economic way to get around this, spam will continue to be a problem. Unfortunately most of the obvious deterent factors adversely effect the average user (pay per send, recipient restrictions, etc).
If you come up with something lateral, let me know and we'll market it to make millions!
Maybe then, in an epiphany of irony, use email to mass market our product!
My only idea so far is to cure the greed. Lots of people have focused on preventing the harvesting of email addresses. Some services like SpamGourmet let you create disposable email addresses on the assumption that they will be lost to spammers. After a certain number of messages, those addresses become email black holes - it goes in and never comes out.
Some people had success affecting the programming of address harvesters by producing "tar pit" scripts. They generate an infinite number of seemingly-valid addresses that just pollute the harvester's database, making it worthless (price per sale goes up). The "robots keep out" signs posted in front of the tar pits then started to be obeyed, because it was in the spammers' best interests.
Unfortunately, it looks like we can't solve the biggest problem at the heart of the issue: people will still buy things from the spam that does get through, no matter how much of the deluge we turn back. As long as there is still some incentive, there will still be spam. If everyone stopped responding, the problem would go away eventually. At least, that's my hope. The problem is that the response rate has to drop to literally zero and stay there forever in order to make a change.
Post a Comment