Spam Free Email

So it is one thing to go after the spammers once the have the money in their pockets, but it might not be a bad idea to go after them before the get the money as well. The best way I know to do this is to report the spammers to the people who are paying them.

Most spammers do not actually sell and ship a product. They are typically affiliates of the people who create, and ship the products. Or they are part of a multi level marketing team that earns some percentage of money based on the sales generated by their sales and that of their downstream members.

The vast majority of affiliate programs and multi-level marketing programs had provisions in their terms of service that forbid the use of spam or unsolicited commercial email as a means to advertise for their programs.

So report the spammers to the people who write them their checks. When the checks stop flowing, so does the spam.

So if the real reason that spammers spam is to make money, the only real solution to stopping spam is to take their money away. So the only real way is to create a financial disincentive for spam.

How do we do this you may ask? I say we do it exactly the same way that Junk faxes were eliminate during the 80’s. When Fax machines first came out on the market they had a distinct set of limitations, most notably the paper they used was on a roll and they had no memory to store incoming faxes. So when someone got the bright idea to program a fax machine to publish their special of the day to every fax number they could find not only did it waste the expensive rolls of paper, but if any important faxes were to try to come in after that they were simply lost.

There are laws on the books which now allow the end user, or the owner of the fax machine, to sue the person sending the Junk Fax for $500 per incident, $1,500 per incident if they knowingly and willfully send the junk faxes against the permission of the owner of the fax machine.

Didn’t take long for people to figure out that they were taking the chance of getting sued for $500 or making a $10 sale. The economics were no longer favorable.

So lets look at the potential new spammer that we looked at last time. We reasoned that 100 people were going to take favorable action in regards to his spam, what if only 10 people had the right to sue for $25 per message?

That would mean that the potential new spammer would be making $25 a day and getting sued for $250 a day.

California actually did have a law on the books that was allowing the owner of the email server to sue for $25 a day per message up to $25,000 a day. The state had just upped the ante on that law amending it to I believe $500 per message per day when the federal government enacted the can spam law. That law basically gives the spammers the right to send you one message and if you are silent they you give your consent for more. The federal law superseded the California state law and so we will never know if it would have impacted the amount of spam sent into California.

The bottom line on this is if you really want spam to go away you need to support the passing of federal legislation that will give the right to the email users and email providers.

If you want a great place to put your support for this, go to http://www.cauce.org

Okay, more than once a month I get into a conversation with a client about why spammers spam. The simple reason is that they do see a profit in the use of spam as an advertising medium. That is the simple problem, spam does work.

Here is the quick and basic version of why:

Look at the minimum expenses that a spammer has. They need a computer, they need decent Internet access, the need some spamming software and a list of email addresses.

Computer: $1,000
Internet Access: $30 a month
Spamming Software: $100
Email Address list: $50

So just to start out as a spammer on a budget all you need is $1180. Most people already have a computer and most anyone who is looking to become a spammer already has a DSL line or cable modem. So the real budget cost for an average person could be as low as $150 to start out.

So you can see that it is easy to get the minimum requirements, but do they really make any money?

Lets say this start up spammer can send out 1,000,000 spam message a day. Frankly this is a lazy spammer as I think they can set out 10 times that without too much effort. Using the 1%/1% rule where 1% of the people look at your ad and 1% of those people perform an action on your advertising an entry level spammer may see 100 people perform an action on his ad.

1,000,000 X 0.01 = 10,000
10,000 X 0.01 = 100

So now you have 100 people doing what you want from your ad. Even if the action they perform earn you as little as $0.25 you are now earning $25 a day. That will earn a spammer about $750 a month.

Now of course this is all estimates and supposition, but the basic principle is sound. The only way to combat this is to make a financial disincentive for spamming. More on that in a bit.