Spam: What Can Be Done About It?
Email spam, aka unsolicited bulk email or unsolicited commercial email, is the mass mailing of unsolicited and usually undesired messages to numerous recipients. Typically, these messages are advertisements, common examples of which are those claiming to enable you to reduce your mortgage interest rate, lose weight, or enhance your sexual performance. While the messages containing advertisements are relatively harmless, the only cost being the time required to go through them and delete them, there are other types of spam that are more troublesome.
A particularly nasty trick used by spammers is to include a computer virus in the email or attachment thereto that will send copies of the message, complete with the virus, to all those on the recipient’s list of contacts, analogous to the way that a biological virus commandeers the DNA of a host cell in order to create copies of itself. The victim is unlikely to be aware that his email account has been compromised until he begins receiving angry messages from his contacts accusing him of spamming.
Existing countermeasures for dealing with spam have had, at best, only limited effectiveness. While spam filters, which are designed to recognize spam messages and relegate them to a designated folder, are continually improving in their ability to detect spam, spammers are hard at work designing spam that can evade those filters. Thus, there is an arms race between the spammers and the spam fighters, with the result that spam filters must be updated regularly and even then are only partially effective in blocking spam.
Regarding legislative remedies, the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, contrary to what its name might suggest, did not actually prohibit spam but only outlawed some of the deceptive practices of spammers. In any case, the law lacked enforcement capability, so it was completely ineffective in “canning” spam.
The main reason that spam is so prevalent is that the spammer incurs an extremely low cost per message sent. The only cost to the spammer is that of compiling or perhaps buying a mailing list; the cost of transmitting the messages is born by the internet service provider (ISP). Thus, even given the low response rate to the advertisements sent, the spammer still comes out ahead. Therefore, one strategy for curbing spam is to increase the cost to the spammer to the extent that the practice is no longer economically viable. The challenge is to do so in a way that has at most a minimal impact on other email users. This is analogous to the problem of designing a chemotherapeutic agent that kills the cancer cells while doing minimal harm to the body.
One way to make spamming more expensive would be for the ISPs to charge users for outgoing emails after some threshold number was reached. For example, the first 300 emails sent per month would be free; after that, the sender would be charged a penny per outgoing email. Those who use their email accounts for purely personal communication would be unlikely to be affected, while the cost to businesses that communicate with their customers by email would be relatively small compared to, say, using postal mail. While spammers could use multiple accounts in order to keep the number of emails sent to within the free email limit of 300 per month per account, managing those numerous accounts would increase the administrative cost to the spammers and also increase the likelihood that the spammers would be identified as such and have their accounts closed by the ISPs.
Another method of increasing the cost to spammers that could not be circumvented by them using multiple accounts would involve letting the recipient decide whether or not any given message received is spam. The ISP would attach a clickable link to every outgoing message to enable the recipient to report the message as spam; some ISPs already do this. If reported as spam, a copy of the message would be sent back to the sender, along with a note informing him that the recipient reported his message as spam, and that he (the sender) would be charged a dime as a result (as would have been spelled out in the ISP’s terms of service). A nickel of the dime collected by the ISP would be credited to the account of the person reporting the spam. This practice, if implemented, would literally nickel-and-dime spammers out of business.