One of the most amusingly stupid categories of spam I get is emails about how “Congress passed a bill” or “The president signed a law” resulting in lower auto insurance or (as they often idiotically say) “driving” rates. They sometimes try to tie it into current events. Here are two nutty subject lines today:
“President’s G8 Summit Meeting Yields Lower Auto Ins. For All,”
and
“Following meet with Putin, President announces lower auto ins. for all.”
Sadly, there are enough idiots out there that this probably does work. Until we come up with some cost for emailing, spam will persist.
Wait.. you get spam?
Tell congress that spam is a revenue stream. That should fit it… no, they would just add to the spam. Or figure out how to make it into some kind of slush fund. Never mind.
You gotta be kidding me Rand you know better. Before the internet people’s physical mail boxes were filled with this crap as well, thus the thesis that if you have to pay for it, it won’t happen is definitively busted. The reason that I have to bring this up as that some idiot in government may see email as a revenue stream. This was proposed by the U.S. Post Office in the early 90’s.
Also in the category of “if you make them have to pay for it, it’ll go away”, those same taglines are the primary category of banner ads on most websites nowadays. Those same banner ads are a revenue stream for many major websites, so you know they aren’t up there for free.
My surprise is that all of those “6 tricks to whiter teeth” and “Obama lowered driving rates” banner ads catch enough people that they still remain a profitable advertising model.
Or it’s just a scam that scammers think work. Scammers are not known for doing due diligence before embarking on scams.
Spam would still exist if sending an e-mail cost something. There is certainly no shortage of it in my regular snail mail box as it is.
Bayesian filtering is much better at detecting and eliminating it.
The problem with snail mail is that right now snail spam is the chief revenue source for our postal service. We who receive the mail aren’t the customer, we’re the product.
Maybe what’s needed is a model where sending is free, but recipients pay only for what they’re willing to receive. That would change the incentives for snail mail because of the cost of physically moving the mail.
As for email, I run most of my incoming mail through Spam Assassin on my server, then it’s forwarded to Gmail where most of what gets past SA gets caught.
I would sooner buy a used car from Putin.
What about a Super Bowl ring, slightly used?