The Insidious Evil of Spam (SPUME)

Other than those who send it, it's hard to find anybody who doesn't hate it. SPAM, Junk E-Mail, Bulk E-mail, Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail (UCE) or System Polluting Unsolicited Mass E-Mail (SPUME) -- whatever you call it, your E-mailbox is probably full of it.

You aren't the only one to hate it. Several groups exist to try and stop it, and several laws have been proposed both at the federal level and at state levels in the USA to make it illegal in some fashion.

Perhaps you don't yet know how much of a problem it is because you have kept your E-mail address fairly private and don't get much. But be warned that people who haven't been so lucky typically get 30 of these things every day, around the clock, and some get over a hundred. A large ISP like AOL gets millions every day. Count your blessings, but soon this will happen to you.

But what is it, and why do we hate it? It's junk E-mail, and in some ways quite like the junk mail that shows up in the physical mailbox at your house. But as much as people dislike that, it's never drawn as much ire as SPUME.

(I'm going to call it SPUME in this article because SPAM is really a Hormel trademark, and UCE implies that the bad bulk E-mail is only commercial, when in fact religious, political and other non-commercial unsolicited mass e-mailings are just as bad.)

There's only one thing of this ilk that we hate more, and that's the telephone solicitor, especially those who call at dinner or other inconvenient times. We made some of their activities illegal, and the USA banned "junk fax" as well. Should we make SPUME illegal too? And why not Post Office junk mail? (It's called direct mail by the marketers, but they are the only ones not to call it junk.)

It doesn't really cost money, but..

SPUME doesn't have that limit. The cost to the sender is very low, and especially when they use certain cheating techniques, millions of e-mails can be sent for well under $100. However, the argument of hard cost to the recipient is a poor one. Even the rare recipient paying 10 cents/minute for an internet connection can download a typical 4 kilobyte text SPUME in one second, for a cost of 0.17 cents. Even an annoying 30 SPUME per day costs a whopping 5.1 cents/day or $18 per year. And most people don't pay for an internet connection by the minute, and most people in the USA pay by the month, not an incremental per-minute charge. Their incremental cost for an unwanted message is truly nil.

Disk space costs 4 cents per megabyte for its whole lifetime. The cost to store that 4KB SPUME for a week is too low to even think about. We really aren't getting all that upset over a fifth -- or more commonly a hundredth -- of a penny of our money being wasted by the SPUMEr. (The ISPs have a reason to get upset, though -- more about them later.) Junk Fax cost most people a more real 5 cents per page, so 20 pages of junk fax a day cost real money.

So while you may whine about the shifting of cost, the truth is nobody whines over 5 cents. Those claiming the cost is the issue really have another agenda, and even though I agree with their other agenda, I don't think this is the way to do things. The real evil of SPUME lies elsewhere.

It does cost you time

The first impact is in the time it takes. It doesn't take that long to delete a message, of course, but day in and day out, deleting 30 starts to grind. Especially when that far outnumbers the real E-mail you get. People who have E-mail accounts to get one letter from their grandson every week are shutting them down because the SPUME makes their mailbox unproductive. But deleting it is also distracting, and that has an even larger cost in time. The SPUMErs goal is to write their Subject line to be as distracting as possible, of course.

It interrupts you

This is where SPUME is most annoying. For those who use E-mail all day, it interrupts them 30 times or more a day. It's almost like a phone ringing randomly 4 times an hour to hear a salesdroid or a hang-up. Just a few moments of your time, but very annoying. E-mail is a fast medium, almost like the phone, not something that comes once a day. It's the first and truest "push" medium, too. An in spite of what some vendors of Push software might believe, you really only want truly important things interrupting your day.

Even so, it's not the cost to the recipient that's the problem, it's the fact that the cost is minimal to the sender which generates the real tragedy of the commons. There is no disincentive -- other than the ire of recipients -- to sending SPUME to vast numbers of people. One beggar on the street might be disconcerting, to be solicited by every beggar, charity and business in the world each time you walk down the street is clearly untenable.

The SPUMErs feel they are just following the same principles of postal junk mail, but they are not. The lack of limits dooms SPUME as a marketing medium, but they won't accept it. Like polluters, they figure a little bit of pollution causes no harm and in fact allows business to prosper. But it can be so tempting to pollute just a little and promote your agenda or product a bit more. But that philosophy is what filled the world with pollution.

It's not what your mailbox is for

Now the SPUMErs have been told many times that we didn't set up our E-mail systems just so they could use them to send us advertising. Nor do we buy a phone to receive phone solicitations. But at least the phone solicitation can't be trivially automated to let one person call a million phones in an hour (and the amount that it can be automated was made illegal.)

But with E-mail the distinction is even clearer because there are other technologies associated with it. I set up my E-mail box for mail for me. For me personally, and not to all members of groups I belong to. When I've subscribed to a mailing list to get mail for a group I belong to, I've done that explicitly.

There are other ways to reach particular group audiences, such as web pages or ads on services for those audiences. Newsgroups and forums exist for people to receive information as groups. And in fact, many newsgroups don't mind a single, low-hype newsworthy commercial announcement done a single time. Some even welcome it. (Newsgroup readers hate messages posted to vast numbers of unrelated newsgroups, messages with no real new content or repeated messages almost as much as SPUME, though.) I don't want to imply in any way that SPUMErs should post their messages to newsgroups, but it's certainly true that getting it in your E-mail box is even worse than getting it in a public forum.

We made our mailboxes to get mail written for us, or group mail we asked for. Not form letters and not mailing lists we didn't ask to be on. When people abuse this resource for their own ends, that's one of the things that gets people upset about SPUME.

"Legitimate" bulk E-mail

The Direct Marketing Association -- the association of postal junk mail marketers -- is against SPUME. They feel it's important to stop it before the wildcat SPUMErs spoil the market for the "legitimate" mass mailers. The bad news for the DMA is that they are too late. Without checks and balances, nothing can stop SPUME from running rampant. There are just too many people out there with a message they think you want to read.

They've proposed mailing only to people who ask to be on lists. A good idea, but still mostly doomed. People just won't ask, not when they see the volume and realize they can go to a web site when they want to to learn about any area of interest. They propose paying people to be on lists, and that might work because it has the inherent self-limit of cost.

But the truth is people just won't tolerate SPUME making their mailbox significantly less useful. E-mail is far too valuable to let the bad drive out the good. That doesn't mean it's impossible for legitimate SPUME to exist, but unless some factor keeps it down to a very small volume (smaller than the volume of real mail) of very well aimed messages, the anti-SPUME forces will do what they can to stop it.

This point will never be well understood. Engineers talk about "signal to noise" ratio to describe how useful a communications channel is. Too much noise, and it drowns out the signal. But if there is too much signal, then the signal itself becomes noise. There are simply too many products that might have a "legitimate" reason to market to me or anybody else. They simply can't all have access to my mailbox, and without a way to pick a select few, the only answer is to let none of them have it.

It Invades Your Privacy

I have yet to come to the greatest evil of SPUME. The mailers of SPUME have been indiscriminate in gathering names. They had no reason not to. So they go about extracting the E-mail addresses of anybody who posts to a public newsgroup or a public mailing list. They scan chat-rooms and extract addresses. They browse web pages and extract E-mail addresses. They pull out site directories, user files and databases of all sorts. They suck down internet databases like the domain registries and anywhere else an E-mail address might be found.

The result has been catastrophic. Do almost anything in public under your E-mail address and you will quickly get SPUMEd. And that may be what bothers people the most. Going "out" in public in cyberspace shouldn't mean you'll get inundated with unwanted E-mail. Privacy is the right to be left alone when minding your own business; but go out into the world of cyberspace and the SPUMErs won't leave you alone

The saddest thing is that ordinary net users have come to realize what is going on, and as a result they start to fear public participation in the net. Many people now don't want to post to a newgroup or mailing list because they know they will get SPUME. It's become common to see people hiding their E-mail address, removing it from the place it's supposed to go, and spelling it out in human language so that automatic reply is not possible. They want to stop the SPUME, but they end up making it harder for the legitimate people who want to reply to them to use the net the way it was intended.

(They are almost as selfish as the SPUMErs in that way. They put the burden on others rather than themselves, making all replyers figure out and type in the reply address by hand, rather than fighting the problem themselves.)

But it's a tragedy that SPUME has scared people away from the net. For now the SPUME hasn't just annoyed me and my neighbour, it's stopped me from even meeting my neighbour. She's afraid to go out because of the noise.

But is all bulk E-mail wrong?

Of course not. But when we have no way of telling them apart, what can we do?

There are lots of bulk mails that are legitimate. Many people ask to be put on mailing lists, after all. And you can't deny companies the ability to mail their own customers or other people they have existing relationships with. (If they annoy their own customers, they pay the price for it.) If you stop by a trade show booth and have them scan your card to get literature, you can hardly complain if they do a bulk mailing of literature to you.

That's solicited mass E-mail, but a company mailing its list of customers, former customers and prospects isn't exactly solicited, but it's not unsolicited either.

We've all used personal mass E-mail too. Who hasn't gotten a bulk E-mailing about a party, or the announcement of a wedding or the birth of a baby? Often we didn't ask to get on those mailing lists, but we don't mind it.

What we object to is the fact that revealing in our name in one context, like a web page -- so that people can mail us about our web page -- causes us to get bulk mailings even though we had no intention of soliciting them when we revealed our name.

Yet this is what the postal junk mailers have done for years. They grab names any way they can. They figure that if you went to a computer trade show, it's legitimate to mail you offering to sell you computers. That if you registered Republican they can mail you about their candidate. That if you subscribed to Fortune Magazine and make $100,000 per year, they can mail you an ad for a Mercedes Benz. But if Nissan were to mail all the people who posted to the newsgroup "rec.autos.makers.honda" (a user group for drivers of Hondas) people would be up in arms.

We've tolerated (but not liked) this for years because of the inherent limits and costs, and because it annoys us only once a day. If you're like me, you go to your mailbox, bring in your mail and stand over your wastebasket. You quickly pull out the real mail -- and sometimes the odd piece of interesting junk mail -- and let the rest fall into the basket. No big whoop. The costs also help, because frankly, if the mailer had any way at all of knowing you were going to just drop it in the basket, or otherwise have no interest in their product, they would love to take you off their list.

It turns out that handling your SPUME isn't so bad if you can get it consigned to delivery once a day, or to a different mailbox or mail folder, with your regular mail coming in "real time" the way you want it. In fact, I believe many of the long-term solutions lie along this road.

The ISPs

The internet service providers, companies like Netcom and AOL, have paid a real price for SPUME. The biggest get literally millions of messages per day, and at that rate, even .01 cents per message turns quickly into real money. Worse, they have to devote staff, in some cases full-time, to dealing with customer complaints over SPUME, complaints about SPUME by their own users, and tuning mail software and Anti-SPUME software to deal with the problem.

And more frightening, they have users cancel their accounts, saying that E-mail (in many cases the prime internet application for a customer) just isn't productive because of all the SPUME. Almost nobody does that to the postal service. (Though in Canada now you can put a sign on your mailbox telling Canada Post not to deliver certain types of bulk mail, and many do it.)

The ISPs are fighting back, with lawsuits, and time spent tuning anti-SPUME software and filters to block all mail from known SPUMErs. They have no choice.

(One of the nastiest techniques of the SPUMErs is to abuse the friendly way most mail computers are configured. They will relay mail from point to point, holding it and forwarding it. They do this because if your computer isn't working, you want somebody else to receive and hold your mail for you. This open configuration can be abused, and SPUMErs will send a single message to a large site and tell the mail system to deliver it to thousands of addresses all over the net. The SPUMEr uses almost no computer resources, the victim uses tons, and worse, it looks to some angry recipients that the hated SPUME is coming from the innocent relaying victim. Slowly, sites are working to close up the old friendly, open configurations of their mail systems.)

It's hard for the ISPs for there are many SPUMErs. One SPUME is like one piece of litter. It doesn't ruin the countryside on its own, but it has to be stopped because once everybody litters, the land is ruined and the costs are high.

So do we ban it?

The ban on junk-fax made some sense. Thermal fax paper costs real money, and fax machines made busy by a junk fax give a busy signal to another real faxer with an urgent message. Computer mail doesn't have either of those problems. SPUME only stops mail from getting through when it reaches epic proportions.

Thus the proposed bill to classify SPUME like junk-fax (H.R. 1748) comes about things the wrong way.

Most of the other bills are even worse. We must be very cautious in any law that seeks to prohibit communication between two parties. Devotion to freedom of expression demands that you only do this as a very, very, very last resort. SPUME is annoying but we don't have a right not to be annoyed, and more to the point, in a free society, other people have some right to annoy!

(Now it's true that other people have no right to make use of our own private property to annoy us -- and the internet is, by and large, a cooperative collection of privately owned systems. Nonetheless, we should try, where we can, to stand by the principles of free expression where possible, especially when we extend an invitation of sorts to the general public to send us data over these private networks.)

We dare not limit what people say, though we can limit the means by which they say it. For example we should not ban an offensive message, but we should stop people from saying it over a loudspeaker on a quiet street at 3 am, so long as there are other, less annoying ways for them to say it.

But it's very hard to draft a law that doesn't stop people from communicating legitimate messages. I might meet you at a conference and look up your E-mail in the directory. Should it be illegal, with serious penalties, for me to invite you to a party at my house?

You might own some stock in a big company allowing you to vote at their annual meeting. Should it be illegal for me to mail you to encourage you to vote against doing business in a country that practices torture?

Of course a law might just prohibit commercial mail, but that only attacks the motive of a message, and not what's really wrong with it. People have a right to attempt to communicate with you to try and sell you their legal products. We might get annoyed at it but we would not wish a nation where the government could stop them.

I believe it's best that we try to solve these problems privately, without letting the government ban and prosecute certain types of communication based on what they say or the motives of the speaker. Unlike the telephone or even the fax machine, computer mail systems are immensely powerful, and can filter, process and sort mail with ease if they have the information necessary to do that.

I believe the answer lies in putting choice in the hands of the individual. If the government is to be involved at all, it should be to enable that choice, at most by defining some very tightly crafted tagging rules that computerized filters can use.

But I also believe that we should attempt to do just that in the private sector first, using existing law, and only invoke the government as a last resort. As I am fond of saying, the internet industry can change more in a long lunch hour than some other industries change in a century. Governments have shown no ability to keep up with this or regulate it with wisdom. They simply inherently can't be as well informed as those as the center of things.

1st Amendment

I don't think any of the laws currently under consideration meet these tests.

Proposals

I am proposing the following steps. Some can work alone, some work in combination with others.

Stop Relay Abuse

Slowly, sites are learning to close these open portals to avoid this abuse. However, there are millions of sites, so closing these holes is taking time. One alternative would be to have sites refuse relayed mail where the relay doesn't say they agreed to do the relaying. This would require all sites that really want to relay (primarily large ISPs and hosts of mailing lists) to install changes, rather than requiring that every open server on the net close tight. As such it could solve this problem more quickly.

Require a real return address on non-anonymous mail

First, improve internet mail systems and protocols to identify mail with a fake or forged return address. There are some simple steps to do this, and eventually digital signature allows complete verification of senders who wish to identify themselves. Then leave it up to users how they want their mail system to deal with mail from fake, anonymous or unidentified users -- deliver it, discard it, classify it, redirect it or delay it, for example. (We would not ban anonymous mail, but we do insist that it be marked as anonymous.)

Requiring a "real" E-mail address does wonders, because it creates accountability. It is the basis for implementing all other rules. It means you can reply back to the sender, and that creates some accountability where today there is little. Accountability brings responsibility.

In many cases the address will lead you to a real person or ISP. Most ISPs have policies against sending SPUME, and a real address provides a real place to make and enforce a complaint.

A "real" address doesn't have to lead to the person, they might be protected by a two-way "anonymous remailer" that hides their identity. That's legitimate for certain purposes -- it's up to you to decide if you want mail from such users -- but unless they can create thousands of fake addresses, you have the power to identify them in some fashion, and block them from mailing you.

Of course I am not advocating a law requiring all people on the net to use a real address or a digital signature. Rather I want to enable the right of people to refuse to listen to those who decide not to.

Blacklist the unrepentant abusers

Identifiability of the sender allows you to say "no more" to mail from an abusive, unrepentant sender, even if they are behind an anonymous remailer. Or you can say "no more" to an entire site if the site is unfairly hiding abusers or has abusive masters.

Blacklists can also be distributed and shared, though there are some areas of concern here, since some people will make efforts to get their otherwise innocent enemies on distributed blacklists, and this must be carefully guarded against, with good systems for those unfairly blacklisted to petition quickly for redress. We also must take all steps to assure that people are not unfairly blacklisted.

Sites that are abusive and unrepentant can show up on more serious blacklists after more serious checking, blocking them from all internet access to you or your ISP.

Limit access for trial users or unbound users

Users who have not agreed not to abuse the net -- or simply brand new users or even whole ISPs -- can be forced with basic router tools to send all their outgoing mail through a relaying SMTP server. (Many ISPs do this for all users already.) This server, however, can do things like throttle back mail to the volume needed by an ordinary user, or detect duplicate messages that don't have tags.

This server doesn't have to be fast or expensive. In fact, getting off of it (by signing an agreement not to SPUME) gets a strong incentive if it's slow.

Insist on tags

Simple tags might require that a mailing say how many people the mailing is meant for, and some encoding of how they got your address. You would probably program your system to accept small mailings (certainly any one to one mail, even from a salesman), personal mailings, or mailings from people who claim they got your address directly from you. The tag might be so simple as to say whether the sender is a stranger to you or not.

You might even accept mailings from people who say they got your address by scanning a newsgroup or web page -- it's up to you.

If they lie about it -- well that's where the accountability of a real address comes in. If they lie, you blacklist them, or their IP address. Or, if there is a law, they are dealt with under that law.

Secretaries

Instead of blacklists, I myself use a "whitelist" system. 95% of my mail comes from people I already know, and it's very rare for mail from strangers to need my urgent attention. So my system knows everybody I have ever sent mail to or saved mail from, and tracks my continuing activity. Those people get right through. Strangers get intercepted by my "secretary," who asks them to confirm who they are and that they are not a junk mailer. A lot like my secretary at the office, who screens out cold-calling salesmen, headhunters and stockbrokers for me, like a lot of other people's secretaries.

If they confirm, they get right through. If they lie, they get blacklisted or worse. (One of the nice things about a 99.9% effective system is that it reduces the volume of SPUME to rare mail from users with a real email address who are willing to lie to get to me, and those people can be attacked with more serious measures. Regular SPUME long ago passed the volume where you could do anything but delete it and sigh.)

Once they confirm they are whitelisted and never have to go through the process again for anybody at my company. It's not a big burden, a quick confirmation the very first time you talk to somebody at a site, and then everything goes through quickly.

The rest is all filtered, discarded or delayed to a once a day batch delivery, where I can stand over the virtual wastebasket and quickly pull out the very rare real mail from a stranger that was delayed because she didn't respond.

All these systems can and should be combined. The unrepentant, abusive SPUMErs who try to get around the systems will be fewer and can be dealt with.

Other Filters

Principles

In applying these solutions, the following principles should be followed:

1. The choice on how to deal with SPUME should be an individual choice. We should avoid having governments make choices for us.
2. We should also avoid having email carriers (ISPs) make choices for us, though they can set tunable defaults if individuals are informed as to what they are and have the ability to change them.
3. We will have to accept a small amount of unwanted mail. Chances are if we manage to block out all unwanted mail, we've probably gone too far. We can handle a small amount.
4. We should protect the ability to occasionally receive communications through unidentified senders. It's expected that "front" organizations will exist to allow non-abusive anonymous senders to participate and get through to us when that's needed.
5. Any blacklisting scheme must have checks and balances to avoid the unfair blacklisting of innocent parties. An appeals process must exist to allow unfairly blacklisted parties to quickly get off blacklists.
6. Tagging systems must avoid the temptation to require a tag based on what a message says, and tend more towards what might be considered "envelope" information, like information about the sender and the sender's relationship to the recipient.
7. Filters and other tools must be careful not to throw out the baby (real E-mail) with the bathwather (SPUME). Today it's possible for most filters to discard a real message from somebody.

Defining SPUME

So what is SPUME? Perhaps the central question to ask when examining any mail is:

"If everybody who could and wanted to did something like this, would it lead to ruin?"

Ruin in this case of usable E-mail systems, because they become swamped with undesired mail, or ruin of public cyberspaces because people fear to participate and let their email-address be revealed.

Key to SPUME is that without a barrier against doing it, its volume becomes unchecked and it does lead to ruin.

This is not a definition, however, it just frames our definition. Things that are not likely to present a problem as they scale do not need to be addressed or stopped. The real essence of SPUME is this:

SPUME: Performing a bulk mailing to a list of people to whom you are a stranger, and who did not request to be on the list.

The first key element is bulk. A single E-mail to somebody you don't know is not a problem. It's how you get to know people. It's mail that is meant for more than one person that is SPUME. Note that even if the messages are sent one at a time, they can still be bulk mail. A form letter modified with a few parameters (like filling in a name or profession or hometown) and mailed to 10 people every day is still SPUME.

Is it possible to send unsolicited mass email to people who know you? Sure. But there is a limit on how many people who know you, and so this process is self-limiting. As noted, it's not uncommon for people to gather together a list of the e-mail addresses of all their friends and send out a birth announce, holiday greeting or party invitation. Sometimes it's personal junk mail, but because it's self-limiting, we can tolerate it.

The definition of a stranger can be quite loose and still work. Somebody is not a stranger if you've had some sort of interaction with them personally. If you've done business with a company, it is no stranger. If you stopped by its booth at a trade show, you know it. If you subscribed to a publication, you know it. (But that doesn't mean its associates that it sells your name to are not strangers.)

And of course people routinely request to be on lists, and that's never unsolicited -- though people abusing an existing list by mailing something that has unwelcome on the list can be guilty of SPUME. They are strangers, the list managers are not.

Sidebar: Auto-Reply

This doesn't ask any questions about the mail or the relationship between the sender and recipient. It simply sets a standard that the sender must be willing to assign a real person to handle the replies. This pretty much allows all personal bulk-mail from non-strangers. But it self-limits large mailings and disallows bulk mailing from non-existent addresses. The rule that "If you want to take up my time with your mailing, you must be willing to have me take up your time with my response" has some value.

However, since reply ratios are probably no more than 1 in 100, this may not be limiting enough. If it becomes productive for mailers to fill our mailboxes and pay overseas workers $1/hour to answer them, the tragedy of the commons still remains.

SPUME Rationalizers

Of course, many who do SPUME have heard that "spam is bad" and so try to rationalize that what they are doing is not SPUME. I've even seen anti-SPUME crusaders talk about using SPUME tactics, rationalizing that when the other guy does it, it's SPUME, but when I do it, it's not.

Many SPUME's begin with the sentence, "This is not SPAM." Of course sometimes they are just plain lying, but sometimes they have actually convinced themselves of it. You will see people accused of SPUME saying, "Oh no, we are firmly against SPAM, we would never do that." That's because they know that people think SPUME is bad, but don't know why.

It's for a good cause

Some people rationalize if the SPUME is non-commercial, and more to the point, for a cause they stronly believe in (even fighting SPUME) then it's OK. The ends justify the means, in other words. They forget that for 1,000 people there are 1,000 particularly worthy causes.

They might even know the "if everybody did it" rule, but they rationalize it as, "If everybody did it for a cause this important by my judgement, it would not be a problem since there aren't that many causes this important by my judgement." But of course it's really people doing it for a cause they think is important in their judgement.

The problem with SPUME is not so much the motive of the sender. The motive (commercial in most cases) is only a problem because it encourages so much SPUME. It's the pollution of the net that's important.

There is no other way to reach these people

Usually this one means, "There is no other free way to reach these people." It's obvious why they prefer free over expensive. And in some cases, the cost of another method, like paper direct mail, is simply beyond their means, so there is "no other way."

But sit down and face it. Your cause or product just isn't that important. If it were, there are other channels -- TV, print, etc. where the message will reach people. People use those systems because they have somebody controlling what comes out of them. Even though there may be 100,000 important messages in the world, nobody has time to consider them all. If we got them all, we would consider none. Each time somebody bypasses the systems that filter this information by sending SPUME, they in fact block out all the other messages. Is your cause, by objective standards, the most important in the world.

The world simply doesn't owe anybody a free channel for their messages.

Sometimes there is no way to get anything but the E-mail addresses for a group of people. In this case, the answer has to be "too bad." There was no way to reach them before E-mail and there still isn't today.

Sure, it will annoy people and destroy the utility of E-mail, I will pay that price

That's not a rationalization. This type knows what they are doing. They must be stopped, with blacklisting and other tools. This is the one area where government intervention might be considered.

It wasn't a very big list

Yes, that means the SPUME annoyed fewer people, but the people who did get the mailing are no less bothered by the fact that other people didn't get the mailing. If the list is small it's easier to find other ways to reach the people.

It should be recognized that many people don't mind a small number of very well targetted mailings, particularly in business. As such I'm encouraging a tagging standard that has the message specify how many people it was sent to (in all mailings for all time, combined.) If the number is low, many people might accept such mail.

This is perfectly fine when done on paper

This is the hardest thing for the "legitimate" direct marketers to understand. The rules have to be tougher here. How would it be if anybody in the world could send a 1,000,000 piece direct mailing for $100, with the only other cost being that some whiners get annoyed? There would be thousands of those mailings every day, and you would need a wheelbarrow to empty your mailbox, and a staff to pull out your real personal mail.

The rules are different here. There is no inherent requirement that the principles of direct mail flow through into the E-mail world. Some would like that, especially as E-mail replaces paper mail in people's lives, but it just can't work that way.

This is a legitimate product

The level of annoyance of SPUME recipients has done some good. It's kept most legitimate companies out of SPUME. They don't want to be associated with its bad name. But some do, figuring that SPUME/Spam means all the truly junk mailings -- the porn sites, the "make money fast" pyramid schemes and the like. Sure, those are bad, they argue, but people won't mind getting real product offers from real companies.

It's true that a lot of SPUME comes from people who might only sell a dozen products by mailing to a million people. Those mailings hurt 999,988 people. But even if a mailing does well, and sells 10,000 units, the other 990,000 are still bothered by it. Viewed from that perspective there is effectively no difference.

Many users are glad to receive our mailings

This is, in most cases, a lie. There are a few people who respond positively to mailings but they are very few. I have seen no evidence of any support by recipients for SPUME, and much evidence of widespread disgust.

Summary of Issues

1. SPUME (SPAM) is unsolicited bulk e-mail from somebody who is a stranger. And there's a lot of it going around.
2. Current attempts to make SPUME illegal are ill-advised. They violate 1st amendment principles, and in general, all non-governmental methods should be exhausted before we begin inviting the government to make legislation.
3. For the individual user in the USA, the physical cost of a single E-mail or even 30 of them is inconsequential. The real problem lies elsewhere.
4. SPUME wastes your time, and interrupts you. But it also invades your privacy and is making people afraid to go out "in public" in cyberspace, thus hurting all on the net.
5. SPUME is like pollution or litter. One causes very little harm, but because there is insignificant cost to the sender, nothing keeps it in check. Other media had some factor to keep them in check, this one needs one.
6. People have a right to communicate, and even to be anonymous, but people also have a right to decline to listen to communications, and to make that decision based on whether the sender is anonymous or identified.
7. Some techniques available include attacks from ISPs on the worst offenders, carefully done blacklists, filter programs and secretary programs, and mailers and tools that insist on real return addresses on messages. However these tools should be created with certain principles of protection of free expression in mind.