See: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog: Paying to Send E-Mail
Everyone that uses email knows about a little problem called spam. Everyone that administers an email system probably knows a little about how to fight it. There have been numerous suggestions about how to fight spam more effectively, some of these techniques have been implemented quite successfully into software products like Baysiean filtering, challenge response authentication, and the most popular DNS blacklists.
Unfortunately all of these approaches only work for short amounts of time, until the spammer can figure out a way to get around them. And trust me, spammers are extremely motivated to figure out how to get around spam filters. It’s simple economics, let me explain.
If you have an email list of 10 million names, and you have a conversion rate (the amount of people that buy your product) of 0.0001% meaning that only 1,000 people buy your product, and your product costs $29.95, sending out that email just made you $29,950. Given that there have be interviews with spammers where they state they employee a dozen people, and clear $1 mill a quarter I have to think that (a) the conversion rate is much higher, and (b) don’t forget the email lists are well over 10 million names.
So what can we do about the spam problem. Without getting super technical about the way email works, let me just say that it was written at a time when users were trusted, and the email systems are trusting as well. I think the biggest problem with email and spam is the anonymity that it allows. Don’t get me wrong, I am a staunch privacy supporter, but when you have no accountability for what you write/send you are more open to abuse the system (With Halloween coming up its the perfect example, ever come across a candy bowl left outside? Ever take just one candy?). Email needs to be authenticated back to the user, systems should still have the options of allowing un-authenticated users to send email, but it should be easy to identify and filter out.
Now the real question is how do you significantly change a system used by so many people worldwide?