Bryce <bryce@digicash.com> writes:
"Toto <toto@sk.sympatico.ca>" typed:
I believe that the 'money-point' for UCE (unsolicited commercial email) spammers is somewhere around .02% for most of their offerings. In other words, they need to send out 10,000 emails and get a response just to break even.
Actually I had a talk with a certain anti-spam ISP owner recently, and she asserted that the spammers don't make significant money from responses to their spams, but are instead making their money from stupid newbie companies who pay them for advertising service.
That's an interesting business model. Alice doesn't know shit about the 'net. In particular, Alice doesn't know that UCE annoys people and doesn't generate income; and Alice doesn't have the technical expertise to set up a SLIP/PPP account, not to mention mass-mailing. Alice pays Bob to mass-mail her UCE from a throw-away account. Alice probably pays Bob a lot. Bob probably promises Alice a lot. Should Alice be encouraged to sue Bob for fraudulent misrepresetation of UCE? :-) Would a journalist with any semblance of integrity try to inform Alice that UCE doesn't pay, instead of calling for more censorship?
It's an interesting proposition. You would think, though, that the spamsters might as well just take the stupid newbie company's cash and then send a couple of token e-mail messages, if that's their business model. :-)
*If* there was a free, easy way to remove addresses of people who don't want junk e-mail from their mailing lists, most junk e-mailers would probably try to use it. The (snail-mail) direct marketers association has it; I put my name on their block list and I get almost no junk snail-mail. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps