Will certified e-mail stop spam? (was: unsubscribing... etc)

[Evan Leibovitch]

To me, spam is simply a scaled up, cheapened-down version of flyers in 
the mailbox. It used to be argued that in paper spam the sender bore all 
the cost, but that is no longer true given increasing municipal 
restrictions on waste collection. Given the existence of online 
directories, even the phone book is arguably a very heavy, very 
wasteful, and increasingly costly-to-dispose-of physical spam.

Of course, that gets to the issue of what spam is, which I heard most 
people defined as "any email that I didn't ask for, either of a 
commercial or hostile nature". At one level this is difficult to deal 
with since folks are bombarded with many unsolicited messages every day, 
so where do you draw the line? Do you send a bill to the pizza parlour 
or real estate agent because their flyer contributed to the fact you're 
over your weekly-bag garbage limit? What if you live near a supermailbox 
and your lawn is filled with the spam of others, now your problem?

IMO the problem has both a technical and a human component. The 
technical component, to me, is the fact that spam catchers are becoming 
better and smarter. The Maia-spamassasin-etc system upon which I rely 
has been extremely effective at enforcing the criteria that I personally 
establish for email acceptability. The rate of false positives is under 
one-third of a percent and still dropping. Meanwhile, I agree with those 
who suggest that ISPs who currently set limits on bandwidth, mailbox 
size etc. should also establish separate personal and business 
limits/rates for outgoing email.

At a personal/policy level, I see spam as a privacy issue much like 
problems faced by harassing or daemon-dialled phone calls or getting 
tons of paper mail that must be read and disposed of. While spam is a 
bigger nuisance because of the volume -- for now -- I see "paper spam" 
as being a bigger environmental problem. I believe that public policy 
has to treat privacy issues in the big picture, and spam in itself is 
just one of many parts of this picture.

Most spam that I see appears to relate to fraudulent activity (phishing, 
419, "OEM software", fake drugs), and IMO should be attacked on this 
levels as crime at the source. If countries can have treaties on 
protecting their citizens' intellectual property, they should also be 
able to co-operate on reducing international fraud. Law enforcement 
doesn't *have* to be far behind the perps if the public will exists.

Most of the pay-per-use answers I've seen here are hardly worthwhile. 
They may reduce the volume of spam somewhat, but will not eliminate the 
larger problem and create new problems and inconveniences of their own. 
They will allow people who can pay for the privilege to continue to 
spam, while others who may have a more legitimate or desperate message 
to get out will be stopped. Turning "general spam" into "spam for those 
who can afford it" is not IMO a sensible approach.

- Evan


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