[extropy-chat] About SPAM again

[Emlyn O'regan]

Having thought about SPAM a lot, what I think is that they are ultimately
undefeatable because of the basic fact that it's essentially free to do (or
stupidly cheap). The cost to spammers of spamming plus the cost of following
up leads as a result is less than the revenue they ultimately get from
sales/scam.

It's seems like we can't make it more expensive to send spam, and we can't
reduce sales because the number of terminally stupid people out there seems
to be a robust constant value. The only manipulable variable is the cost of
following up leads.

Here's a report on spam from a site whose credibility I can't verify:
"Further, 7% of emailers report that they have ordered a product or service
that was offered in an unsolicited email. Herein lies the problem: While
some have suggested that if people simply stopped responding the spam
industry would dry up, some bulk emailers claim that even 0.001% positive
response rate is a break-even point.
"http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/reports.asp?Report=102&Section=ReportLev
el2&Field=Level2ID&ID=865


0.001%??? So if they send 1,000,000 emails, they only need 10 positive
responses. Wow.

I've said this before here; the way to stop spam is to clog up the reply
channel. Real people need to use the method given by the spammers of
replying, and reply, posing as real customers, but never actually
purchasing. So the spammer has to waste time dealing with "potential
customers" who never actually buy anything.

For the spammer who sends 1,000,000 spams and gets 10 responses, things are
break even. Say they actually get 100 responses and are doing well, the
bastards. Now change the story; imagine that, of the people who receive
spam, 1 in 100 decide to respond and waste the spammer's time. Anything from
just one email to following through several interactions then backing off at
the last minute. Now the spamer has 10,100 responses to hunt through for the
magic 100 suckers. I think that probably changes the equations somewhat.

Is anyone organising something like this? Some kind of "Talk to a spammer"
program, convincing people to respond and waste their time (and never, ever
buy anything!). If you could get people to reply even to one spam in 100,
just an email, you could damage all spam profitability. If people responded
to 1 in 10, spam would probably become completely unusable as a business
technique. That's probably about 2 minutes of work per day for each email
user, probably less than they spend deleting spams. Small price to pay for
killing spam.

Now this doesn't work for spams that point to totally automated bogus
websites. These just need shutting down in the standard way (unless you can
break them somehow). Likewise, email address harvesters seem to be
benefitted by this approach; excepting of course that what they are
harvesting is the emails of almost uniformly hostile people :-).

Any comments? Anything wrong with this approach? How do you defeat it as a
spammer? If it works, how can it be gotten off the ground?

Emlyn

> -----Original Message-----
> From: MB [mailto:mbb386 at main.nc.us]
> Sent: Friday, 23 January 2004 8:19 AM
> To: ExI chat list
> Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] Webpanto
> 
> 
> 
> Would you please discuss that with respect to only reading email in
> plain text?
> 
> Regards,
> MB
> 
> 
> On Thu, 22 Jan 2004, Brent Neal wrote:
> 
> 
> > I'd be willing to wager that there was a web-bug in that email that
> > "phoned home" to report that your email address had a person at the
> > end of it.
> >
> 
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