A Penny Per Email

Spam disgusts me. It has rendered free email, one of the most heartfelt examples of human cooperation, completely untenable.

I have been relying on email, for business and personal connections, since I worked at TRW in 1980. I used to run a medium-sized UUCP hub at FileNet in Orange County, CA on a VAX 750 named Felix with five 2400 baud Racal-Vadic modems. Email was not really free in those days. Everyone paid for their equipment and their phone calls with real cash.

The beauty of the email system, though, was that we all cooperated. We relayed each other’s email on the assumption that if everybody did what they could, then everybody would benefit. It worked. For the person with fingers on the keyboard, email was free and pretty darned quick. Even for-fee email systems like CompuServe and MCI Mail installed gateways between the “free” outside world and their customer base.

When the ARPAnet opened up into the publicly available internet, the intricate cooperation of UUCP sites relaying email after 11:00pm (when the long distance telephone rates were at their lowest) was no longer necessary. Virtually any company could have “an internet connection” and it got a whole lot easier to send an email message.

The advent of the internet meant that there was no direct relationship between the number of messages sent (or the size of the messages) and the cost to the company. The T-1 line cost the same whether it was sending email messages or sitting idle. The notion of free email persisted, easily transitioning from “free because of my neighbors’ generosity” to “free because no one wants to do a cost analysis of the networking hardware and connections and allocate it to individual email messages.”

In our naiveté, we cared about staying in touch with each other so much that we had built a system to make communication easy without worrying much about security. After all, if you send an email message, presumably you want the recipient to respond. If that is the case, why would you use a forged return address?

It turns out that there are several reasons to tweak your return address, if not forge it outright. The most common is that you are sending your email from one computer (at work, perhaps) but you want the responses to go somewhere else (to your home, for instance). This is almost always true, especially today when extremely few of us actually log into the computer which handles our email.

In 1984, the Moscow Institute for International Affairs demonstrated another reason to fake the return address: April Fools Day. If you remember the political climate in 1984, you can well imagine the belly-aches and belly-laughs which ensued when the Kremlin sent a message directly to American computer users! You can still read the original message, archived at Google Groups, and you can read about the hoax at Wikipedia.

A decade later, the most nefarious reason to forge a return address cropped up: the message is spam and the sender most definitely does not want the recipients to respond via email. The spammer just wants your money, usually illegally, and wants to hide his identity. This is so effective that we are all drowning under a deluge of crap which obscures the messages we do want. We waste time dealing with the spam. We waste money on software to filter out the spam. If we are employers, we waste money paying our employees to deal with spam instead of doing their jobs.

So if we all hate spam, why does it keep getting worse? The answer is surprisingly easy: money. It turns out that we don’t all hate spam. A few people actually spend money in response to receiving spam: not many but enough to make spamming wildly profitable. I won’t delve into the details; you can look them up on Google. Try searching for “spam economics” or something similar. The bottom line is that it costs essentially $0.00 to send a spam message. If you can send a million spam messages for free and you make a few sales, you have made a phenomenal profit.

I love technology but I have to admit: technology is not solving the spam problem. Spam keeps getting worse. My business, Hen’s Teeth Network, is pretty typical. Here is a graph showing our incoming email volume over the last seven days:

The dark green stuff at the bottom represents the only messages that I want to receive. The rest is crud, a lot of it downright dangerous.

If technology won’t fix the problem, how about the law? The feds passed the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and not only has it failed to solve the problem but spam volume continues to escalate. Many states have passed their own anti-spam legislation. None of it matters. Few would argue that we see less spam in 2007 than we did in 2003.

One good option remains: change the financial environment in which spam thrives. If it costs more to send spam then the money to be made off of it, spammers will stop sending the stuff. For the spammer, it’s all about the money. You can be certain of this: the spammer has nothing personal against you. He does not want to annoy you. He just wants your money. More to the point, he wants to receive more money than he spends. We may be failing abysmally at reducing the amount of money that the spammer receives. Fortunately, we can easily change the amount of money that he spends.

It is time to abandon the “free” email system that we built back in the good ol’ days. Let’s start paying to send email messages.

Holy cow! Did Art really say that?!

Yes, I did. Email has never been free, anyway. It cost significant amounts of money way back when and it still costs money now. These days I shell out hard cash for spam filtering software and I do it every month. Obviously, I’m willing to spend money to send email. You are, too. You spend money for an internet connection. You spend money for virus scanning software (to make your email and web surfing safe). You probably spend money for spam filtering and anti-phishing software. Here is my proposal:

Let’s establish a completely new email infrastructure where it costs a penny to send an email message. Messages sent via the new system land in a separate inbox from the traditional email. Spammer’s won’t use this system because their profit margins are nowhere near 1%. They would lose money big-time if they tried to pay $0.01 for each message.

But the spammers already use hapless victims’ computers to send their messages. This just means they will spend the hapless victims’ money, too.

No, it doesn’t. We are really good about protecting the things we spent money on. When was the last time you let someone steal your postage stamps or place unauthorized calls on your cell phone? Perhaps you would buy a “roll” of a hundred email stamps. If this vanishes, you’ll sit up and take notice. Sure, you only lost $1.00 but it is still a tangible loss. The flip side is that once your “roll” of email stamps is gone, your machine will no longer spew spam. At a cost of a whole dollar, we have both stopped the spammer dead in his tracks and brought to your attention that someone is stealing from you.

A penny per message is too much. Small businesses and individual people can’t afford it.

Oh come on. Get real. I send a lot of email. In the first half of 2007, I sent 2,343 messages. That would have cost me a whopping $23.43. That includes 1,753 business messages ($17.53) which my company would have paid for and leaves me with a personal six-month bill of a massive $5.90.

We can afford a penny per message. We are already paying way more than that.