On Thu, 12 Feb 2004, Dan Kolis wrote: > Dan says: > Well, I have never gotten an unsolicited paper item for Viagra, but have > gotten hundreds of electronic ones. There is a distinction between > unsolicited communications, direct marketing, and spam. Its subtle and > creates (in the US) first amendment rights issues that are non-trivial. > > But, 100M email mass solicitation at $0.001 each is $100K, which is a medium > good houseworth of dollar value here. I think it would annihlate the worst > of mass spam. If you could charge it to the abusers, it might. The problem, as I pointed out, is that you cannot charge it to the abusers. You can only charge the innocent. > I think whoever thought up the idea should be identified as a pretty sharp > cookie. Its just slices through so many thorny issues with few downsides. They are a sharp cookie, alright. Wish I had thought of it. Except, that it won't have any impact on spam, but will make the person collecting fee commissions very rich. Hmm. Could it possibly be a purely economic motiviation by a certain group? Nah. > Of course, if absolutely no one responded to spam the incentive wouldn't be > there to send it. So maybe we just need more time for young people .... Hey! > There is a guy in Nigeria who wants to give me two million dollars. Gotta go! This is another myth. The worst of the worst spam isn't responded to. I've tried a number of times to purchase Viagra from spammers, assuming that since Viagra is a prescription drug, and I don't have a prescription, I could complain to the authorities. So far, while I've seen some reasonably complete-looking websites, no one has even charged my credit card--a debit card with very little money in the account, but enough to cover the Viagra. Why send the spam if you aren't go to charge the credit card? It wasn't even the case that they tried rip off the money, and send nothing... For spammers, they are pretty honest, except for the lying part. I also tried responding immediately to 20 of the Nigeria scam spams. No one has tried to solicit personal information, and the one (and only) response I did get just said the address was forged. So what's up when even the scams aren't really the scams they appear to be? Now we have statistics that the top 95 genuine spammers are mostly in compliance, yet the junk in my emailbox is not even partially in compliance. How do that work out? --Dean