A congressional committee approved The Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act of 2001, a bill that would give consumers the ability to block email spam. The proposed law would require firms to label junk mail as an unsolicited commercial advertisement and to include a return email address that allows consumers to remove themselves from the list. The FTC could take action against violators, and Internet Service Providers could sue violators.
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/088/business/Consumers_notch_gain_in_battle_vs_junk_e_mail+.shtml
posted on March 29, 2001 06:00:28 AM
"The proposed law would require firms to label junk mail as an unsolicited commercial advertisement and to include a return email address that allows consumers to remove themselves from the list."
So .... every one of the 22,000,000+ businesses in the USA would have one FREE SHOT at spamming you (one per email addresss) before you have the right to not ne forced to subsidize their ads.
Do the math ... if only ONE percent of them decide to spam, you will get 600+ emails A DAY (at each of your publically nkow adddresses) and you will have to send 600+ requests from each address asking to get off the list EACH Day, or they have the right to conhtinue mailing you. And if more than 1% decide spam is good?
Filtering at the ISP level means the cost of the email ads has alre4ady been passed onto ALL the recipients, including those who are protected by the filters ... you subsidize the spam whether you see it ot not!
Ready for that? Ready to sort through 600+ congressionally approved spams looking for real emails from your real customers? Ready to pay MORE when your ISP's email server is busy vouncing thousands of congressionally approved spams per hour to keep your inbox manageable?
posted on March 29, 2001 10:04:39 AM
That is absolutely the fundamental flaw with all opt-out marketing schemes. It's the same problem with telemarketing. You can tell a telemarketer to remove you from their list, and they, by law, have to comply; but that does nothing for the numerous other companies, and I'm not even sure that prevents the one company from shopping your number around to other direct marketers (if they can't ever hope to get a $20 or more purchase, then maybe they can get 5-50 cents off your name anyway). With telemarketing, this does happen to be better than nothing. Unfortunately, even this very incomplete solution would not translate the same way to spam.
Telemarketing still costs the marketer the money of making all those phone calls (it just costs us consumers our time, and maybe our money if we want CallerID to block these inconsiderate... people). Spam, however, costs the marketer only a fraction of what it ultimately costs the recipients, and can also be sent in much higher quantities.
As abacaxi pointed out, an approved opt-out scheme would likely be seen as an open invitation to all the companies who are currently sitting on the fence due to the spam war, to instead decide spam has been legitimized and they can now jump off the fence and into our email uninvited.
Junk faxes were banned because those shifted much of the cost away from the sender. Spam is very similar in many such regards, but it can also be employed in far greater quantity than junk faxes or telemarketing ever could be.
Spam has no real legitimacy now, and furthermore is seen as being mostly about porn, scams, and other assorted garbage. If fringe elements are already sending enough spam to tick off most netizens, imagine every other local and national company getting in on the act, with all the muscle of their sales/marketing departments.
As nice as it is that there have been some looks at the problem, I fear "legitimizing" any opt-out scheme for spam would be a cure worse than an already disfiguring disease.
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What's being done in the name of direct marketing nowadays is crazy.
The above are all just my opinions, except where I cite facts as such.
Oh, I am not dc9a320 anywhere except AW. Any others are not me.
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