In article 20020504102453.28261.00008195(at)mb-fe.aol.com,
itsawesomed(at)aol.com (ItsAwesomeD) wrote:
> Why are you people making all this fuss about UCE, SPAM or whatever you may
> want to call Bulk Email today? Let me go over some of the arguments I have
> seen made against it and maybe y’all can explain to me what the problem is by
> pointing out an argument that actually makes sense.
>
> I guess the most prevalent argument is that the recipient pays for it and the
> sender pays nothing.
I don't believe anyone makes quite that argument. The cost-shifting
argument is more subtle; that the recipient pays part of the cost of
receiving unwanted mail. For there to be any legitimacy to unsolicited
bulk e-mail, the total cost of delivering it should be covered by the
sender. It isn't.
>That is pure BS. Could someone show me one person on
> the
> internet that has ever been charged a nickel for receiving an email?
Many dedicated connections are billed on a base+usage or even pure usage
basis. The customer literally pays for every byte that goes over the
wire. Most people with collocated servers are familiar with such
charges. Back when CompuServe was an independent service (and the
largest commercial online provider) they charged users for each email
received from the Internet. Today most providers of Internet services
via mobile phone charge on a byte-transferred basis as well, so every
piece of data, including every letter in an e-mail, costs the recipient
money.
>That is
> part of all internet services,
No, it isn't. For about 30 months between 2 different ISP's I had
Internet service which was strictly IP connectivity. Neither provider
included any mailboxes because I had no use for their mailboxes.
>and those services don't cost any more or less
> if you receive one or one million emails.
Are you really that ignorant of how the net operates?
There is no such thing as unlimited service. Most mail systems limit
mailbox size, and when the mailbox hits the limit, additional messages
bounce. Mail systems which do not limit individual mailboxes still have
overall limits and usually the results of those limits being hit are
uglier than mailbox quotas. The cost of a rejected e-mail may be very
high. To enlarge a mailbox quota is possible, but few providers who
offer that will do it for free. A bigger mailbox costs more money for
the end user because disk space and bandwidth to receive mail cost money
for the provider. The fact that most users do not see these things as
line items in a detailed bill doesn't make them free.
>Are you people naive enough to
> believe that an ISP or online service would charge any less if there was no
> such thing as bulk email?
I directly know of 2 ISP's who raised prices between 1999 and 2001
directly as a result of their increased costs of handling *unwanted*
bulk email. I can't speak to the reasons behind the increases seen at
most other ISP's, but I know of those 2 cases where spam forced end
users to pay more. I also know that AOL claimed that spam-handling was
part of their last rate hike, but I can't say whether that claim is
true.
>Besides that, the sender does have to pay for an
> internet provider, the software to send it, the address list, etc. I pay for
> cable TV, but that doesn't give me the right to whine to the stations about
> the
> unsolicited advertisements that fill 20 minutes out of every hour of my
> viewing
> pleasure.
Sure it does. They won't change anything, but you can complain. You are
not their customer, really. Your eyeballs are their product, and they
sell them to advertisers.
With cable TV, you have a unidirectional medium: there are producers,
transporters, and viewers, and the three are clearly distinct. The
content that viewers want (on 'basic' channels) is mostly funded by
advertisers. The transport from the producers to viewers is mostly
funded by what the transporters charge viewers. In some cases (like most
'premium' channels) the viewers pay fees that fund the production as
well, and so get advertising-free content. Ad-supported channels in fact
are on the whole sufficiently profitable that their transport from the
producers to you is somewhat subsidized by advertisers for cable
channels, and completely covered for broadcast channels. It is pretty
clear that in a really competitive environment, cable companies would
end up charging viewers essentially nothing for 'basic' cable, just to
be able to get those precious eyeballs.
E-mail is radically different. It is intrinsically a 2-way medium, and
that nature has resulted in a funding model that applies the costs to
sender and recipient quite evenly in all cases. That's a problem for
mail that the sender wants the recipient to read but that the recipient
doesn't want to have anything to do with. The recipient bears roughly
half of the cost of delivery of mail whether it is wanted or not.
>I have to pay for the PO Box where my mail is delivered, too.
But you do not need to do that to get mail delivered. You can have mail
delivered to your home or place of business for free or use General
Delivery. The PO Box is an extra convenience for you and what you pay
for it doesn't fund delivery of mail or your sending of mail, it only
pays for a storage spot. Delivery is paid for strictly by the senders
of postal mail. This is why the arguments about postal mail are so
different (at least to anyone who thinks) than those about e-mail.
> So
> as you can see, that argument makes no sense.
The cost-shifting argument isn't refuted by the fact that radically
different funding models support radically different media like cable TV
and postal mail, or by your ignorance of how people actually pay for
Internet services. For paper mail and TV, advertisers fund their
delivery completely, and with TV they add on the bonus of funding other
content that people actually want in order to get them to look at the
ads. For e-mail, the advertiser and the target each pay for roughly half
of the delivery of the message, and the recipient is likely to pay at a
higher rate because of economies of scale. (i.e. I pay hugely more
per-byte for my bandwidth than someone on a well-utilized OC-3)
> Then there is the "theft of services" by using mail relays without
> permission.
> Well, the only reason that is having to be done is because of people like you
> trying to force the ISPs to prevent people from sending mail advertisements
> through their own provider.
Let's clarify what you are saying...
Criminal trespass is being *forced* on spammers? Because they don't wish
to abide by CONTRACTS they have with providers???
The suggestion that such contract terms are being imposed on ISP's from
some external group of anti-spammers is absurd. It ignores the real
history of AUP's and of spamming.
AGIS proved that a network which supports spamming will be cut off from
the rest of the network *BY ITS PEERS* because there is no value to
other ISP's in peering with spammers. ISP's simply do not respond to
pressure from the bulk of NANAE/SPAM-L participants, because most of us
have very little real influence over anything an ISP cares about. What
does have an impact and what they will respond to is other networks or
important customers disconnecting from them. This is why SPEWS, XBL,
Spambag, and similar blacklists have relatively little impact: the
listed entities upstream of the spammers won't take action because their
important customers in listed space see very little impact from those
listings. Blacklists that are used by serious networks, like the SBL and
the MAPS lists, have fast and severe impact that ISP's respond to.
>Now one has to do what they have to do,
No one has to spam. Really. It is not a necessary act for anyone.
>and each
> time someone "steals" the services of an open relay you can consider
> yourselves
> as the reason and accept the blame for forcing them to do so.
That is simply insane. No one is 'forced' to use open relays or proxies
or otherwise attempt to evade detection of their spamming. The clear
alternative is to not spam.
> Most people
> who
> send bulk email are legitimate people who are just trying to make a living.
That's a simple lie. Most of them are knowingly and intentionally
violating contracts with their ISP's. There is no legitimacy to a
business which requires fraudulently entering into contracts to
function, and the people guiding such a business have no personal
integrity. Ralsky, Kreuzahler, Scelson, Haberli, Mindshare, Flonetworks,
Virtumundo, and their ilk are ethically bankrupt entities who have no
claim to legitimacy in anything they do.
> Of
> course, there should be no PORN or Chain Letters, but you should have no
> problems with legitimate advertisers.
I've never seen a legitimate ad via unsolicited bulk email. Such a thing
is impossible. The medium corrupts the message.
>But you people have a problem with ANY
> mail you don't like.
Well, your phrasing indicates that you don't understand your audience.
There is no 'you people' reading your tirade. There are a multitude of
views expressed in NANAE and I'm perfectly happy to repeat that I find
the 'any mail that I dislike is spam' view to be more dangerous than
some varieties of spam.
> Then there is the whine that Bulk email will make the email system obsolete.
Not obsolete, just unusable. There are already signs of this happening.
> The same whine was cried by the same types of people over television ads and
> postal bulk mail.
Do you have any citations for those claims?
Ad-supported TV was the first sort of TV and remains the dominant sort
in the US. I'm not aware of anyone ever claiming that ads on TV or in
postal mail were a problem for the infrastructure of either medium.
E-mail is very different, again because of the dominant funding model.
It is not designed to make advertising a means of subsidy for the e-mail
infrastructure. People don't want most ads, and in the end they will not
pay for the costs imposed on the parts of the system they pay for to
support the delivery of content that they do not want.
>Advertisements make the world go around and bulk email is
> just another kind.
Ads do not make the world go around. They do fund nearly all
unidirectional mass media. They do provide the scale necessary to allow
the USPS to continue to offer affordable and reasonably good mail
service. Bulk postal mail has at times actually subsidized first-class
mail, but that's not clearly the case with the current rate structure.
It does provide enough volume (and revenue along with it) to make
delivery to nearly every address about 300 days per year plus operating
offices in nearly every town in the nation possible.
E-mail advertising does not provide that sort of support to the
infrastructure of the Internet to make general e-mail possible or
cheaper than it would otherwise be or even more reliable.
>It will no more destroy the system than it did any other
> system that has been used to advertise products or services. You are only
> scaring yourself with that whine.
But it already IS destroying the system. Let me explain by concrete
example:
The mail server handling mail for scconsult.com has no problem handling
all the non-spam mail for all scconsult.com users. Unfortunately, a lot
more mail gets sent to it. If there were no anti-spam measures taken to
protect that server, it would fail every day. The purpose of that server
is to deliver mail that scconsult.com users want to get and to handle
sending their mail out. It is not intended for delivery of ads which the
users have not requested. When unsolicited ads are sent to scconsult.com
users, I am not paid in any way to deliver those ads. If I did not
reject most of them, those users would be flooded with ads AND the
server would need to be upgraded to handle the increased volume without
filling its disk regularly and losing mail as a result. Instead of
performing an unfundable upgrade (i.e. eat the cost because no one else
is going to pay for it) to handle mail that users DO NOT WANT, I have
extensive spam blocking in place. Very good spam blocking. It rejects
nearly all of the spam before it is even accepted. It also rejects a
very small number of pieces of legitimate e-mail. Sometimes I can tweak
rules to prevent repeats of those 'false positive' rejections, but
usually I can't do so without allowing in an unacceptable amount of
spam. The alternative is to make senders and recipient jump through some
hoops to communicate, so that spammers (who don't know the right tricks)
are easier to identify. Every incremental step that makes using e-mail
harder to use makes it useful to fewer people and erodes it as a whole.
Every piece of legitimate mail rejected by a spam filter erodes the
functionality of e-mail as a whole.
When you multiply my little server by the millions, the problem becomes
really serious. E-mail simply doesn't work in some ways that it used to
or that it really should because of spammers. Users of freemail systems
mostly cannot send mail to the Chrysler Group of DCX because of
anti-spam measures in place there. An unknowable number of people cannot
mail AOL users because AOL has silent spam-filtering that drops mail
from suspect sources. AOL claims that 30% of the mail they handle is
spam even with their draconian blocking, and they raised their rates to
fund its handling last year. Unlike TV ads or postal ads, spam makes
e-mail more expensive for everyone, not less.
> What about lost time from work. Oh my God, people have to spend 30 seconds a
> day to delete junk mail from their system at work. Well, if they didn't go
> out
> and surf the web on company time no one would have their address.
Simply false. Dictionary attacks on corporate mail servers are real,
debilitating, and very common. Even supposedly "legitimate" bulk mailers
end up with addresses obtained that way, apparently because they trust
the slimier elements of the spamming industry to provide them with
addresses. .
> Controlling
> that is a job for the company, not the self proclaimed email police.
If spammers didn't attempt to hide who they are and where they are,
their spam ight well be a matter for many companies to take directly to
the real police.
> Besides,
> they waste several minutes a day gossiping around the coffee maker. Should we
> not ban coffee from the worksite?
It's very clear that you have no direct experience of the corporate
workplace.
Spam is not merely a matter of wasting worker time deleting it. It can
be a real problem for the mail infrastructure of a company (especially
when spammers try the dictionary attacks) and that causes a cascade of
costs as the company attempts to keep spam out while the slimeball
spammers keep trying increasingly deceptive means to get spam in. There
is a weapons race between the owners of private networks and spammers
over the use of those private networks. Spammers seem to believe that
they have a right to use anyone's mail server without paying, while the
owners of mail servers disagree.
> Then there is the cost of the WAR against SPAM, the cost of which is being
> forced on the ISPs to prevent their systems from being overloaded. More BS.
It's not about ISP's mainly. they pay a very small fraction of the costs
of fighting spam because they operate a small minority of mail servers
and take far less stringent measures than other owners of mail servers.
> If they took all that money and used it to upgrade the systems and increase
> their capacity we would all be better off.
That's nothing short of laughable. Who is supposed to pay for such
upgrades? As a professional in the field, I assure you that it is far
less expensive to fight spam than it is to build systems that can handle
all the spam that spammers want to send. Beyond that, fighting spam
makes the users who are actually paying for the mail systems happier
than building over-sized mail systems that can handle all that extra
unwanted mail.
You are suggesting that people who own mail servers should build systems
to handle mail which is unwanted by their users. That's not feasible for
ISP's or for the corporate systems which make up the bulk of mail
servers on the net. Until spammers pay the owners of mail systems for
every delivery, your suggestion will get nothing but incredulous gigles.
>But instead, the few whining
> complainers out there like yourself are conning them into wasting that money
> on
> a war that cannot be won and should not even be fought.
That's just plain delusional. Consider for a moment that MAPS was the
creation of 2 ISP execs. Ask anyone in a corporate IT department where
the pressure to stop spam in their company comes from. Go find Phil
Lawlor (maybe look in a McDonalds?) and ask him where the pressure came
from for AGIS to stop hosting spammers. It's not the grumpy geeks who
make the most public noise who apply the significant pressure, it's the
guys with leather chairs and doors on their offices.
>You people should be
> ashamed and they should have more sense than to listen to a small minority of
> the people who will whine and complain about anything if the think someone
> will
> listen.
I have been tasked with stopping spam in many environments, and in every
case the initiative has come from people who make decisions over who is
employed by the company and what the resources of the company are
applied to. I don't ignore the people responsible for getting me paid
for my work, your advice not withstanding.
> That is all I care to write at this time. I will check back to see if any of
> you whining crybabies can come up with a legitimate reason for your hardcore
> stand against bulk email. In the meantime, consider this...
>
> If the ISPs could find a way to charge per delivery for email, they would be
> laughing at you every time you complained.
If there was any feasible way to require senders to pay per delivery,
there would be no need for anyone to fight spam.
>They would become the strongest
> proponents of email advertising the world has ever seen. The only reason
> they
> are allowing you to complain and pretending to take it seriously is because
> they want to have a perceived to be legitimate reason to charge you for email
> and you are making their case for them. So when the big ISPs start putting
> an
> email surcharge on your bill, look back at how you helped them get away with
> it
> and take pride in the fact that you helped them to steal billions of dollars
> a
> year from the average person who uses the internet.
You clearly do not understand market economics or Internet history.
Charging recipients per delivery would be a suicidal move. It has been
tried and it has failed. Very few businesses or individuals would use an
e-mail system where advertisers could increase the hard costs
unilaterally.
What could theoretically work is a sender-pays system where every
sender of e-mail pays the provider of final delivery for every message.
I say 'theoretically' because in practical terms there's no way to move
to such a system from the current one. We are too well adapted to the
system of unmetered email to switch to a metered system where every
message causes accounting between at least 2 and very often 4 or more
different entities.
Of course, any system that actually imposed per-message costs reliably
would spell the end of spam, and possibly the end of e-mail marketing
altogether. If the marketers could impose hard fluctuating costs on
users, the users will go away. If the marketers are asked to pay costs
for every delivery, they will make very sure that they send to only the
most likely prospects, which does not include people who don't want the
ads.
--
Bill Cole
I don't speak for my current employer, much less my former ones.
That disclaimer will not change the minds of a few lunatics, of course...