The Dirty Little Secret About Spam

Spam Versus Smart Marketing

But the real battle is around opting in. Many people in the spam debate favor a law that would require marketers to receive individuals' explicit permission before sending them email. Unsolicited commercial messages would be illegal. Hardigree supports this: He wants a level playing field, he says, where everyone sends only mail that's wanted. The DMA adamantly opposes such an approach. Unsolicited messages, it argues, allow new companies to be born, and existing companies to find new customers. Or, as DMA president Robert Wientzen decreed at a Federal Trade Commission forum on spam, "there wouldn't be any solicited email if we didn't start with unsolicited email." His remark was roundly booed.

The trade group argues that, if legislation and enforcement can rid inboxes of fraudulent email, market forces will impose discipline on legitimate marketers. "If I don't want email, I'm not going to buy from any company that keeps sending me email," Cerasale says. "And that's going to drive the business. Because in the end, companies don't want to piss me off."

It's an appealing argument. Smart marketers have always understood that, over the long term, successful selling depends on nurturing relationships with consumers. A mass mailing that wins a dozen new orders isn't worth alienating 100 existing customers. "It leaves a very nasty feeling in people's mouths," says Mark Cready of WeightWatchers.com. "The nuisance factor is very high, and we don't want our brand to be associated with nuisance." But if that's really so, why is J.P. Morgan Chase offering credit cards to people it has never heard of? Why is Kraft blindly pitching its coffee to any demographically appropriate addresses it can get its hands on? The implication is, they do so because they have no relationships with these customers to put at risk -- because, in fact, they don't care.

Critics contend that the DMA wants to rid the world of spammers, thus freeing its members to do pretty much the same thing. "The DMA is making it easier for its members to send spam," says Julian Haight, president of SpamCop, a vendor of antispam technology. "It should be making it harder."

Percentage of spam that is in some way illegal, given existing state and federal laws, according to the Federal Trade Commission: 70

Filters, Loopholes, and Laws

When the FTC convened its first annual forum on spam in Washington, DC on April 30, several hundred people packed the room, and more were patched in via teleconference. Attendees included three senators; one representative; three FTC commissioners; senior executives from AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo; dozens of activists and researchers; and even several spammers.

With so many people in the room, with so much attention and money devoted to the problem, why is spam getting worse? It's getting worse precisely because there are so many people in the room. All of those people -- representing countless diverse interests and motives -- have put a host of proposals on the table. None are perfect. "It's clear," says Sernovitz, "that no one is close to getting something done."

Most of the current solutions rely primarily on technology designed to stop spam after it has been sent -- that is, software that filters out messages whose content raises red flags. But spammers can fool the filters. They get around some traps, for example, by embedding white type against white backgrounds. Recipients can read the words, but the filters can't.

Many experts believe that any antispam legislation is likewise doomed to failure. If email fraud is banned in the United States, they argue, the spam industry will simply move to countries such as Brazil and China, where American laws can't reach. Already, some U.S.-based spammers, disconnected by their American ISPs, simply reroute their mail through ISPs overseas.

All of this is why there is increasing consensus that spam can be slowed only by addressing its perverted economics: Make senders pay for their messages, and market discipline will rationalize the industry. Today, a marketer can send 10 million messages for free. If the cost per address were even just one penny, "my guess is that most spam would go away," says Mark Wegman, a researcher at IBM, who with a colleague has come up with theoretical proposals for a cost-based system.

But in the foreseeable future, any mechanism capable of authenticating and processing per-message payments would cost more than any fee that even above-board marketers would be willing to pay, observes Steve Atkins, a longtime Internet technologist and activist. That simple truth is the reason that any economic solution would likely require a total overhaul of email as we know it. "The system we have now is doomed," says Haight of SpamCop.