Make 'em Pay!

I received 68 e-mails the other day. None were fan mail or hate mail. They weren’t love letters or notes from friends. Two messages were work related and one was from my mother. The other 65 were “spam.” That makes me about average. Each and every American with an e-mail account should expect about 2200 junk e-mails over the next year. Experts (there are experts on everything) predict that number to rise to 3600 over the next four years.
Spam is a costly scourge. Spam messages are the electronic equivalent of remora or barnacles or tapeworms. Not only is the volume of spam increasing but, because spammers are including more elaborate graphics, each message uses more bandwidth and gobbles up more computer resources. Networks are becoming clogged and bogged down with this junk.
Among the messages was one offering pills that would increase my bust line by two cup sizes. My satisfaction was guaranteed! Two other messages promised me “male enhancement.” Earlier this week, I was offered software that would permit me to create counterfeit college degrees or Social Security cards.
In any given day, I can expect to receive several messages offering me debt relief, and several other offers of new credit cards, thanks to my great credit rating.
And, about once every other day, there is a message offering me a one-day trial subscription to porn sites.
I have even been offered the chance to become a spammer myself. For $139, I could buy a CD containing 400 million verified e-mail addresses and get in on the ground floor of this money making opportunity. It even included the e-mails of 6 million Chinese, establishing me in potentially the world’s largest market.
I know how this started. Once upon a time I rarely, if ever, received spam. Then, a little popup window offered me the chance to win a video game. I don’t play video games, but my son enjoys them. So, I filled out the survey that the drawing required and spam found its way into my mailbox the next day.
It began as a trickle. At first, I believed the little disclaimers at the end of the messages offering me the opportunity to “opt-out” of future mailings. “Click here” it advised.
So, I clicked there. But, the volume of e-mail kept increasing. I checked into the opt-out option and learned that, rather than removing me from the mailing list, it verified that my e-mail was an active account. To the spammer, when I clicked there, it was like a fisherman seeing his bobber dip below the surface of the water. He had hooked me. Now, he not only had someone he could continue to send spam to, but he had a verified e-mail address that he could sell to other spammers.
Attempts to control spam yield very little success. Supposedly spamming is illegal in Washington. But, I live in Washington and I don’t even know who to complain to.
A whole economic sector has sprung up to fight spam. Spam blocker software is often advertised in pop up windows. Occasionally, I even got a spam message offering me software that will protect my e-mail account from other spammers. Unfortunately, even the best spam-blocking software only manages to intercept about 10% of all spam. Spammers continuously adapt the messages to elude the anti-spam software.
We need a new approach. Banning spam will never work. There are First Amendment problems and it’s hard to track spammers down anyway.
But rather than actually legally ban spam, how about forcing spammers to pay for the computer resources they now exploit free of charge? If, for example, a spammer had to reimburse the recipient of one of his e-mails 1 cent for each message he sends, then somebody using that CD with 400 million messages would have to cough up $4,000,000.
This really makes perfect sense. Spammers are using resources for which they now pay nothing. Network administrators are being forced to invest money in new resources to keep the spam from overwhelming their systems. The people who are using these resources are the ones who should be paying for it.
But, if spammers were forced to pay for the resources they use, I doubt that they would use it in the first place. And my mailbox would be cleaner.