Tag: Spam

At the top of the list of stupid ideas that just won’t die has to be the idea that taxing e-mail might be an effective way to deal with spam. This is a bit like telling someone that the way to treat a migraine is with a shotgun blast to the head. Yes, it might stop the migraine, but it won’t leave you in a state worth enjoying said pain relief.

Technical solutions to spam are, of course, helpful but they are also likely doomed. Grover Norquist argues for purely technical solutions saying,

The Internet software writers will solve this problem so much faster than some stupid committee in Congress.

If he means that they will likely be ineffectual, I might agree with him, but Norquist clearly thinks there is some technical solution to spam. But this is the one insight tha the “tax e-mail” folks have on their side — the open nature of the Internet puts the balance of power in the hands of those who would engage in disruptive behavior. It will always be more expensive to defend against spam than to send it, just as it is much cheaper to launch a DDOS attack than it is to defend against one.

Anne Mitchell of the Institue for Spam and Internet Public Policy has it exactly right — the only way to deal with spam is go after the individuals and companies who are using it as an advertising method,

The senders are only secondary. Go after the people who are advertising their product through spam, because that’s why spam perpetuates.

Even that, however, will prove to be an extremely laborious process that may very well fail to stem the tide of spam. Ultimately, I agree with those who maintain that spam will result in a decline in the importance of e-mail. E-mail will always be a useful tool, but spam will increasingly make it less and less useful. People will supplant it with other tools and alter how they use e-mail.

For example, I use an anti-spam tool that guess at what is spam and what is not. It tags suspected spam and routes them into a special mailbox. Some people actually go through and make sure there aren’t any false positives. Since I’m receiving hundreds of spam a day, I just route the spam to the trash and delete them without a second look. That’s not ideal, but it’s good enough.

I’ve read a lot of negative things about Tiger Direct over the years, but I have never had any problems with them. Until the other day when an e-mail arrived in my in-box that apparently originated from the comapny.

Specifically, the e-mail claimed that Tiger Direct had changed its security system which necessitated resetting the password associated with my ID. The password was included in the e-mail which also included a URL to logon to update or change customer information.

After a little investigation the e-mail looked legit and I sent a scathing e-mail to Tiger Direct to the effect that I couldn’t believe they would do this sort of thing.

First, with the prevalence of e-mail scams that make users think they are updating PayPal or E-Bay accounts when they are really giving con men their important information, it seems sensible to never send out this sort of e-mail. In fact if I were a scammer, I’d send out spams targeting Tiger Direct customers and see if I could hook a few unsophisticated users.

Second, sending me a new password to my account in a plaintext e-mail is unbelievably stupid to the nth degree. Gee, why not just post the password on Usenet and send me a link where I can find the password in Groups.Google.Com?

Did I mention that I used to be a Tiger Direct customer?

Jim Roepcke reports receiving a very bizarre spam. It’s not the content but how the spam was targetted that makes this one odd — the spam was CC’d to Jim’s wife as well. That’s a rather sophisticated (and especially aggravating) level of targeting spam.

Weekly Standard editor Christopher Caldwell joins the growing crowd of people who propose taxing e-mail to solve the spam problem. Somebody really needs to get all these folks in a room and actually explain to them how e-mail works and why this idea is about 10 times worse than the actual spam problem (especially at Caldwell’s proposal of 1 cent per e-mail, with the first 5,000 e-mails/month tax exempt.)

Caldwell uses his screed against spam as a screed against libertarianism — i.e. the lack of regulation of the Internet shows what happens when libertarian ideas are put into practice. He writes,

But there is no chance that the Internet will return to its old level of user-friendliness until lawmakers recognize that the decision to leave it unregulated was a serious, ideologically driven mistake.

But libertarians hinges on the ability to easily exercise property rights. The problem with spam is precisely that it is difficult to exercise property rights over bandwidth such that I can efficiently and cheaply keep out people who spam me with herbal viagra messages.

The solution is not a raft of dozens of different regulations — as Caldwell proposes — but rather mechanisms to make it easier to enforce such property rights. This is the beauty of proposals that would require spammers to use real e-mail addresses and tag their messages with “ADV” in the subject line, and offer a bounty to private individuals for tracking down violators.

Yes, the spam problem is bad, but poorly thought out regulation could result in something worse.

Source:

You’ve Go Spam. Christopher Caldwell, The Weekly Standard, June 16, 2003.