Spam. A small
word. But a big problem. We all suffer from having to deal with
spam. Each single one of these intrusions is small,
seemingly insignificant, hardly worth worrying about. But when a person’s private mailbox is
crammed daily – hourly – with scores or hundreds of spams, the problem becomes serious. We should not have to spend our precious time
sorting through emails like this.
Some of us even have to change our eddresses multiple times
to avoid a mailbox filled with crazy pitches for all kinds of things we don’t
need or want, things that are insulting or gross or disgusting.
And to say that spam is like junk mail is to be grossly
unfair to junk mail. In fact, spam isn’t
at all like junk mail, which self-controls through the expense of real money in
mailing costs. Spammers do have setup
costs and the person running the computer is on an hourly rate, but even with
having to do a lot of work in hiding IPOs and finding new ways into the market,
each spam message sent can only cost about a hundredth of a cent or less.
To send a millions spams at that rate might cost $100 – but
the work is mostly pushing buttons and the cost is in the setup, which only
happens once. For a guy to push those
same buttons to send 10 million emails for that same $100 means that each spam
message would cost one-thousandth of a cent.
And while direct mail’s return was good at 1-2%, that same return on ten
million spams would be 100,000-200,000 people.
Sure, they don’t get that kind of return, but even at a
hundredth of one percent, they're still hearing back from 1,000
people. Not bad for a hundred
bucks investment.
And those spammers are clever – they can disguise their
point of origin and often hack into a legitimate system to avoid detection and
prosecution. And they often operate in
countries where there's no law against sending unwanted emails out to a billion
people.
Here's the thing: no
one is sending spam for free. Someone's
paying for the spammers to send. So if
we can’t get to the spammers themselves, the government could certainly hold
responsible the companies they are pitching.
And it’s time to stop illegal spamming. NOW. We all get spam that seemingly
comes from reputable companies. But
somewhere in their promotional chain, the crossover happens from coupons and
Groupons into spam. And the way to truly
combat that flavor of spam is to hold
the reputable companies responsible.
So why doesn’t the government go after spammers through the
companies they’re pitching?
In just one recent (and large) collection of spam were
these, among dozens of others:
eHarmony
Partner
FREE
this Weekend ONLY - No Credit Card Needed
HotCloseouts2013
Today..
Brand New Apple Ipad 32GB for $17.57
Lifestyle
Lift
Do
you look older than you feel?
Improvement
Center
Change
your life with a Walk-In Bathtub ]||''_[
AIG
Direct Life Insurance
$250k
Term Life Coverage for less than $15 per mo
Match.com
View
Photos of Local Singles on Match.com for Free...
Simplyink
SAVE
up to 85% on Ink and Toner today – Free Shipping
Marine
Essentials
||Blood
Pressure Myth Exposed…?
Insider
Consumer Trends
Want
to look younger? Help has arrived.
BlackPeopleMeet.com
Dating
View
Profiles of Black Singles - Free to Look
In these examples, eHarmony is paying someone to send emails
– so levy a fine on eHarmony for the spam.
HotCloseouts is paying someone – so hit HotCloseouts with a monetary
penalty. Lifestyle Lift is paying
someone – levy a big fine on Lifestyle Lift.
Walk-In Bathtub is paying someone – another financial penalty for
Walk-In Bathtub.
And the same for the rest of those villains: fines for AIG and Match.com and Simplyink
and Insider Consumer Trends and BlackPeopleMeet.com. If we make the benefactors of the spam pay a
hefty price, they will stop using the spammers to get
business.
And all penalties would be based on the number of reported
spams, extrapolated out for how many total spams that each reported spam
represents of the original gargantuan list.
Granted, there are many more spams that aren’t linked back
to reputable companies, but holding these corporations responsible would go a
long way toward defeating spam. So please, write letters - emails! - to your congresspersons. Flood them with pleas and demands to stop spam. Get them thinking about this solution to a growing problem.
David Hakim is an
internationally-published journalist and award-winning author who has run
several newspapers – and recently received a commendation for his short story That
Man in the London Aesthetica
Competition. He can be reached at dhakim at earthlink.net
