Sometimes I wish that I could send a spam message advertising viagra or something, just so that I could track down the people who try to place an order. Not to kill them or anything, but just to ask them what the heck they were thinking.

Here's why it works. From Overheard in the Office (no link due to content)
Barnum was right.

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I'm not evil.
An evil person would do the things I think up.

another idea is that they could be malware; programs people wrote to be less malicious than viruses and the likes but gives them a thrill nonethelesss.

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"I will do my best to understand and explain the universe from big to small without invoking miracles, unrepeatable events, or divine intervention. In place of those things I will use observations, mathematics, and science."


-Cross
My travel blog

Some of my Astrophotography


Those that lack education have a hard time understanding its value. - Cross

I did miss your point indeed, I thought you were referring to a fake "from" address.

It is a form of spam indeed, but there's a difference:

I'm a member of Microsoft Live. The add was for a feature in Microsoft Live. It is hence a directed form of "internal" spam.

I'm no Viagra customer, nor did I ever express interest in Viagra or related subjects, especially not from Russia. I have not written myself up to any group having any connection with viagra. Any (Russian) viagra add hence is a total shot in the dark, and a very rude form of spam.

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

I guess Nicolas has a point. I don't want credit card applications, but every once in a while my credit card company sends me special offers. Of course I think they are trash, but I do have a working relationship with that company.

If you could eliminate all unwanted contact in the world: email, phone calls, post, conversations, and the likes, this world would be a lot quieter and less interesting.

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"I will do my best to understand and explain the universe from big to small without invoking miracles, unrepeatable events, or divine intervention. In place of those things I will use observations, mathematics, and science."


-Cross
My travel blog

Some of my Astrophotography


Those that lack education have a hard time understanding its value. - Cross

There are a lot of people who can't afford internet, who use library and school computers. I realize 1/4 cent per isn't very much, but if you add in having to get the payment to your ISP (regardless of whether they accept credit cards or not; most of my friends don't have them), it is going to add up to be an awful nuisance, and while, say, $1 or so a month really isn't that money, most of my friends are running tight enough on money as it is.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Another difference is that the more "legitimate" forms of ad e-mail generally offer a real way to opt out. Unlike spammers, for whom this provide proof the address is live and makes it more valuable to sell. So there is a difference, but I still don't like it.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

People other than spammers who are currently taking advantage of the current email cost structure would have to start paying more in a pay-by-the-message system. Their email is not free now, however. It still costs the ISPs to handle that email and they pass the cost along to their customers, so the cost is being paid by Internet users in general. Taxes and college tuitions pay for library and school Internet access so users of those systems are already helping to pay for it. The problem with the current price structure is that the cost is distributed among all users without regard to email usage. That means everyone ends up paying for the billions of messages generated by the spammers.

I don't think I and others should have to keep paying for vast quantities of spam just so some college students won't have to plunk down a nickel to send twenty message at ¼¢ each. If it's really a problem then the schools could pay for some number of messages per student per month and a little more tax money can be given to libraries to allow visitors to send a limited amount of email. Without spam, the Internet will be less expensive to operate so the schools and libraries would save money in spite of paying for a reasonable amount of email. And if someone with little or no income has been sending a hundred messages per day then he'll have to get a job or do without, just like with any other product or service.

Apparently the companies don't even need to make money. The spammers offer to spam say 10 000 people for $100, the company thinks 'what the hell, it must be somewhat effective if peole use it, whats $100', they pay the spammer but get no money. Then along comes another company repeat ad infinium... No sales, but the spammer makes $$$$$, and the spam continues...

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If this writing is blue you're going too fast!

The libraries don't, generally, get enough tax money to pay their expenses as it is, you know. I know, for example, that the library in which one of my friends works can't afford decent cleaning; she's always having to do that work herself on top of all the other things she's expected to do--and she gets payed not-that-much-above-minimum-wage.

These days, it's nearly impossible to survive without some kind of internet access. If the schools and libraries had to start covering people, they wouldn't provide it anymore. (And for the record, for most of the people I've known who went to college, that's more tax dollars at work--or else large amounts of debt to be carried by the student for years. My best friends owes a fairly prohibitive amount for her not-quite-finished Master's.)

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I haven't seen a 'stop getting this rubbish' option in that mail though.

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

Money is a problem, but does someone else's need for money obligate others to pay for the cost of their email plus the cost of paying for spam plus the cost of handling the spam when it arrives? Should a business have to pay an employee several dollars per day extra to extract legitimate email from a pile of spam just to save one student a quarter of a penny?

If libraries and schools aren't getting enough money it makes no sense to continue making them pay for spam by keeping Internet access expensive by continuing to allow spammers to send advertisements at their expense. They'd have more money to spend on other things if spammers paid for their own email. If students need Internet access to survive then it makes more sense to bring down the cost of maintaining the Internet.

Universities would have local networks so students and teachers could email each other for free. They'd have to pay only for email sent to external Internet addresses.

That would be really annoying for large email lists that send out a very large number of messages a day, think of BAUT for example...

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If this writing is blue you're going too fast!

Lists that send lots of email use lots of Internet resources to do so. It seems only fair that they pay for what they use instead of having the cost shared by less active Internet users.

Libraries don't, generally, provide e-mail addresses to patrons coming in off the street, either, do they? I'm guessing anybody who's using a library computer for their internet access is using a free webmail program like Yahoo or Hotmail.

If a per-email fee were established, Yahoo would just be eating that cost anyway - there's no way for them to pass it on to the consumer.

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2009 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

If the ad revenues of free email services exceeded the cost of the email then the free email sites might be willing to eat the cost. They'd probably limit the number of messages each user could send per month. That might be good enough for most college students. Those who find that they must send more might have to sign up for a paid service. Or they could sign up multiple times under different names. If too many people did that then the free email services might disappear.

I still haven't seen it properly addressed as to how most spam is from botnets. The $/email idea still won't affect the spammers all that much. The people who get infected with spambots would pay the fee.
"several countries" it says. It took years for the world's countries to agree what the international symbols for restrooms would look like, (no reference, got that factoid from a NASA tour of Marshall Space Flight Center a few years ago). How are we suppose to get every country in the world to agree to charge a for email? If we're charging 0.25 cents/email in the US, would that work out to the equivalent cost for a third world nation too? Or would it follow the exchange rate? If it does, then somebody charging USD for sending spam but sendin it from a third world country is still going to make a tidy profit.

People infected by spambots will quickly reach their credit limits that have been set by their ISPs. Then the spam coming from their computers won't be delivered.

We need no agreement from other countries about what to charge for an email. We charge what we want. They pay it or their email doesn't get delivered. We charge whatever it takes to stop the spam that's coming from their countries.

I checked on the MSN "spam" again. It ain't spam. You have an option to stop receiving the offers. The only thing remotely spammy about it, is that they do send them by default, but only to Live members.

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

That's kind of totalitarian of you. I mean, how many people just here are from somewhere other than the United States? I have a very close friend who lives in Canada. Quite a few of you are friends of mine that I wouldn't mind exchanging e-mails with, and again, not all of you live in the US. Would I just not be allowed to talk to people whose countries wouldn't pay what the US demanded? For heaven's sake, there's international agreement about postal rates.

What's more, those poor innocent sods whose computers are affected are, in your system, still getting charged for all those e-mails they didn't send. The spammers aren't, and so your system still doesn't work.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

The poor sods whose computers are infected need to see to their own security. Until they do they'll be responsible for any mail their computers send. Anyone who's worried about it can arrange for their ISP to give them a low message limit. 100 per month ought to be enough for most people. If a spambot uses your entire monthly allotment it will cost you only 25¢. Someone who needs 1.000 per month won't have to pay more than $2.50. It will be a one time charge unless the person doesn't take care of the problem and lets it happen again. A spammer who wants to send a million spams per day by spambot would have to infect 10,000 computers at the 100 message limit every day. That's not going to happen. The quantity of spam would drop nearly nothing compared to what it is now. Spambots would not be a problem.

It might cost a lot to send email for someone in a third world country due to the horrible exchange rate, but perhaps something can be done. Maybe it can be handled like a collect phone call. The email receiver in the U.S. can agree to pay the fee for email from certain foreign email addresses. A limit would have to be set so a virus can't use the foreign system to send large numbers of messages. Maybe all Internet users can set up buddy lists. ISPs would not charge the fee if the sender is on the receiver's buddy list. The idea is stop stop spam, not to collect as much money as possible. This would also help out college students. A computer virus could put a spammer on someone's buddy list and that person would get spam again until he cleaned it out, but that shouldn't take long.

I don't think charging for email would ever work unless there were total collusion, or it was legislated. If everyone but Yahoo, just as a hypothetical, started charging per email, and Yahoo! remained free, it wouldn't take long for nearly all of us to start using Yahoo exclusively. Advertising money would soon be flooding Yahoo's coffers as it would be THE way to reach, maybe, 19 out of every 20 'net users. Soon, others would figure this out, and the "free" services would be the richest in profit due to advertising money.

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"I have this theory that the Apollo missions were faked when NASA found out that general relativity was wrong because the Earth was expanding due to the Sun's iron core being influenced by magnetic waves from the electric universe after being perturbed by Planet X and thereby causing global warming. Where should I start a thread about this?" ~ ToSeek

"Those are the people that wonder how a thermos knows whether to keep something hot or keep something cold." ~ NeoWatcher

It's the sender of the email that pays for it. If Yahoo! kept its service free it would still have to pay other services to accept mail from its customers. All its ad revenues would be paid to other ISPs unless it restricted its customers to sending mail only to other Yahoo! users.

In the meantime, it would cost nothing to send email to Yahoo! customers so Yahoo! would get 100% of the spam that's being sent to everyone else right now. It would have to upgrade its equipment to handle the load.

I don't think it should be legislated. Each ISP should be free to set whatever price it liked. If one charges too much then its customers will abandon it because their friends would complain about the high cost of sending them email. If one charges too little or nothing at all then its customers will continue to be buried in spam. Eventually, the free market would determine the prices.

If some sort of buddy list system were set up so your friends could email you for free then email will be nearly free for everyone except the spammers. When someone you know sends you an email he'd pay his ¼¢ for the first message and you'd put him on your buddy list. He'd never pay again. A spammer who wanted to email you would have to pay every time. Due to the volume of mail that they need to send, no spammer could afford it.

not if it had ALL the ad revenue. They could charge what they want for ads if they had the only truely free email service.

and of course they could block the guys that send spam from sending spam to cover the big costs.

__________________
"I will do my best to understand and explain the universe from big to small without invoking miracles, unrepeatable events, or divine intervention. In place of those things I will use observations, mathematics, and science."


-Cross
My travel blog

Some of my Astrophotography


Those that lack education have a hard time understanding its value. - Cross

If it were so easy to just block the guys that send spam from sending spam then we wouldn't have a spam problem now. Also, the paid services could raise their prices for receiving email from Yahoo! and Yahoo! could not retaliate by raising its email reception price because it's a free email service.

They could charge what they wanted for ads but that doesn't mean the advertisers would pay it. If they charged too much then the paid email services could offer to advertise for less because they have the emailing fees that also make money and don't rely solely on ad revenue.

The paid email services are free for their own customers. It costs their customers nothing to receive mail. The fee they charge for sending mail is actually the cost that the recipient's ISP is charging. They're just passing it along. If Yahoo! decided to switch back to free email they'd be lowering the costs of people using other services by not charging them to send email to Yahoo! customers. They'd still have to pay for email that their customers send to other ISPs. If their ad revenues can cover that and the cost of handling tons of spam then that's fine. People who don't want the spam can use a paid service and shell out that big 25¢ per hundred emails, less the cost of sending email to Yahoo! customers, of course.