Re: A prediction about the Presidential campaign

John Dallman <jgd@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
This is a stricter treatment of category 2 than I apply to postal
mail, for these reasons:

* e-mail costs me money to receive - not much, but not actually
zero. Electricity, disk space, etc., not counting my time.

Receiving postal mail actually costs me more, per item. The reason
the burden of spam is more significant is simply because there's
orders of magnitude more of it. To get a similar volume of postal
mail would mean I'd have to somehow haul a dump-truck full of it to
several Dumpsters (it wouldn't fit in just one) every day. And, more
significantly, that I'd have to leaf through it all in search of real
letters, bills, etc., which I don't think I could do in a day even if
I did nothing else.

The allocation of costs between sender and receiver is different to
that of junk postal mail, and this makes even honest companies use
it with less selectivity.

Yes, the reason why spam is so voluminous is because it costs the
sender almost nothing. I believe I *would* get a dump truck full of
what Harry calls "standard mail" every day if postage and printing
costs were close enough to zero.

* There is a substantial market in "laundered" e-mail address
lists: ones gathered by genuine spammers, and then sold under false
pretenses to companies that want genuine opted-in lists. At least,
that's what plenty of real companies say has happened to them when
they get caught spamming. Quite often it seems to be the result of
genuine extreme naivete on the part of their marketing departments.

There was some of that ten years ago. By five years ago, I don't
think so.

I just checked the subject lines of my most recent hundred million (!)
blocked spams. As far as I can tell with some simple searches, not
one of them was touting lists of "opt-in" email addresses. (One
touted "cleaned" email addresses, and another, physician email
addresses.) In the '90s, lists of millions of "opt-in email
addresses" were among the most common things advertised in spam.

* As the result of the previous points, and the huge mass of
fraudulent spam, e-mail's usage for advertising is entirely debased.
No honest company should be using it, IMHO; it can only harm their
reputation.

Exactly. Spammers aren't really companies at all. They're individual
criminals pretending to be companies. Probably very few of them make
so much as minimum wage for one person.
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
.

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