Confused about spam

Posted 27 November 2006

There’s a couple things I just don’t understand about the massive proliferation of spam.

First, who responds to these messages?

I assume someone must, or companies would stop sending it.

Do people not realize that most of these messages are blatantly deceptive? Who would want to do business with a company that uses these sorts of practices? Are people this desperate for unofficial sources of drugs to improve their erections?

It would be fascinating to see some profiles of the companies that send this spam, and the people who are their customers.

Second, why is it so hard to stop?

It seems to me that a simple, effective, and valuable solution would be to provide a mail infrastructure that collected one cent per message. Anyone who didn’t want spam could simply decline to accept mail that didn’t go through this collection process. No one would choose not to send a legitimate message for a penny, but it would destroy the economics of sending out millions of messages for a few replies. And the money that was collected would provide ample incentive to build and support the mail infrastructure.