Spam - a little honesty please

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 14 February 2006 07:57

Opinion and Analysis

I must admit I like my anti-spam folder. I'm not quite sure how the vendor configured it but it works as an almost perfect catchment area for my technology stock alerts. I know that's the folder to visit for my daily updates on tech stocks or any other important emails that I seem to be missing from my other folders on a particular day. Oh I still get tons of spam - just not in the anti-spam folder.

Let's be perfectly honest and face facts. Spam filters are rubbish. They don't work and in fact they can be a nuisance. Quite often business colleagues and I have wondered why our emails have gone astray, only to discover eventually that an important email we have been waiting on is either sitting in someone's spam folder, has been bounced or, worst of all, has disappeared into the bowels of a spam-eating filter monster.

So what do we do? There are only a few options:

 we just put up with all the spam and keep clearing our inboxes, like we do with our snail mail letter boxes several times a day;

 we install spam filters and still put up with tons of unwanted spam, except we also must expect to put up with legitimate emails not getting through;

 we try one of those spam blocking programs that requires each and every email sender to manually authorise themselves in order to get through to you, although we may then find it difficult to get subscriptions to many of our favourite email publications who mail out by the tens of thousands;

It appears that none of the above offers a viable solution to the spam problem. Is there anything else we could try? Well, yes but most email users probably won't like it. We could all pay to use the global email network, just like we pay to use the internet, SMS services and snail mail.

If in order to send emails, we all had to use a licensed email service provider and pay a nominal amount for each email message; spam would most likely disappear overnight, as would email viruses and phishing scams. We would still probably be on the receiving end of targeted email marketing campaigns. However, the scatter-gun bulk emails to millions of harvested email addresses, touting cheap Viagra, fake Rolex watches, porn sites, Nigerian money scams and so on, would disappear from our inboxes.

How much money would it have to cost us for such an email system to be effective? Probably not all that much really. Professional spammers have to send millions of emails daily to get an acceptable return on their mail run. If they were forced to pay just 0.1 cent per email, their business case would be in tatters. Meanwhile, the cost to legitimate email marketers and business users would be acceptable, particularly if email delivery was guaranteed; while for low-use consumers the cost would be negligible.

There is talk that Yahoo! and AOL plan to introduce a paid email service with guaranteed delivery. The cost of between 0.25 cents and 1 cent per email sounds way too high but if the service does come to fruition, the results should be interesting to watch.