[tlug] Eliminating spam using email with an economic model

["Shannon Jacobs \(6881\)" <shannon.jacobs@example.com>]

> Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2006 08:59:43 +0900
> From: "Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com>
> On 06/12/06, Shannon Jacobs <shannon.jacobs@example.com> wrote:
>
>> Your basic spammer is a greedy, lazy bastard
>> dreaming of striking gold.
>
> I am not so sure that this is true any more. I think your "average"
> spammer is now a professional spammer. Maybe Godwin can shed some
> light on this, as I think he is much more kuwashii than most on this
> issue.

No, there are only a few big fish at the top of the pyramid, though they do
generate the lion's share of the spam. From what I've read about them, those
few at the top are still bastards, but they are not lazy nor stupid.
However, you could say the same thing about the top people in many fields,
though the mafia is the 'profession' I regard as closest to the spam
industry. (In most fields, the top people are not bastards, but for spammers
it's clearly a prerequisite.)

>> The hilarious punchline is that the spammers will sometimes work so
>> desperately hard for their dream of not working anymore--but they'll
>> only do that when they think there's a possible goldmine.
>
> I think spammers make decent money without having to work particularly
> hard. Everything is automated, so all they have to do is buy their
> lists of email addresses, feed them to the software, and go. I think
> the part of spamming that requires the most work is maintaining your
> business relationships with the companies whose products you are
> advertising. How that is any different, in terms of work required,
> than your average sales or advertising cube warrior, I cannot tell.

On this point I actually have some secondhand evidence from an ex-friend. We
actually went our separate ways before he sank all the way to the level of
mass spamming, but I can say he was already working quite hard on the edges
of the business (in a particular category of Internet-supported marketing)
and not making anything close to 'decent money'. I can't really say about
minor spammers, but looking at the numbers in terms of prices and response
rates, and I'd say that almost none of them can be anywhere close to 'decent
money'. However, I admit I don't have any hard data on that.

Yes, it's easy to buy lists of email addresses, but I'd wager that most of
the easily obtained data will turn out to be garbage. Again, returning to
what I've read about the major-league spammers, their databases are quite
sophisticated--and not for general sale.

>> I very much agree with this. My own plan is for a spam-proof email
>> system that lives transparently in cooperation with SMTP. That
>> essentially reduces the spam problem to a four cell interface table
>> and you can let the users decide how they want to configure it. For
>> this brief description, call it the NEMS (for New EMail System). The
>> table is:
>>
>> SMTP -> SMTP is the warlike spam-filled status quo
>> NEMS -> SMTP is treated as status quo (because SMTP can't do
>> anything else)
>> NEMS -> NEMS is spam free
>> SMTP -> NEMS is the decision locus.
>
> I really don't understand how this could be implemented. Can you
> provide more details?

Well, there a number of ways to ways to define spam-free email systems. I
actually favor a pre-paid postage system that would basically be an
electronic equivalent of snail mail. However any email system that
associates *ANY* real cost with sending email has already destroyed the
spammers' divide-by-zero economic model. In actuality, if you allow for
reciprocal accounting, very little real money needs to change hands, though
I think it's important to keep relatively little economic slack in the
system.

The main rub that people complain about is the compatibility with SMTP,
which is what the above table is referring to. The mechanism I proposed was
actually using a header extension for encrypted postage that would simply be
ignored by SMTP, but validated, canceled, and postmarked by the final
delivery server. (You could also do it at the other end, or at both ends.
Doing it at the delivery end is easiest from the SMTP perspective, and you
just need to allow uncanceled postage (from Case 2 above) to expire and be
reused after some reasonably long interval.) However, in my case I admit
that I want my NEMS address blocked in Case 4. I just want *ONE* email
address that will never get spam, no matter how many people know it.

However, once you have any real economic model in place, then you can go to
town with it. How about auctions for your email access? My idea here was
that your email service provider (ESP) would act as an intermediary to hold
and hide your personal information. If the ESP leaks any of your personal
information, then they are cutting themselves out of the loop, so they have
strong incentive to protect your privacy. You specify what you're currently
interested in buying and how much email you'd be willing to receive for such
products, and then the ESP would try to find the best companies willing to
pay the most to read their information. In essence, they would be doing
pre-qualifying of the prospects, and the companies would then know what kind
of prospects they were bidding for. For example, I'd be willing to look at
15 minutes of email advertising each day when I'm seriously in the market
for something like a new computer or a new apartment, and it would be very
much in the interest of certain companies to pay for that access at those
times. (Note: The 15 minutes would be based on the amount of text and my
reading speed. In terms of maximizing the total value and their own
commissions, it would probably make most sense for the ESP to split the
quantity of text into fairly small parcels and auction them separately.
Also, I'd want to see offers from several companies so that I'd have real
choices.)