On Wednesday, July 30, 2003, at 07:25 PM, Jerry Yeager opined: > The thing of it is, if I need to buy something, then I want to see the > ads so that I can have a place to begin to make a choice. Until I > decide I need to buy something, bleah. So is it a question of taste? > For things we want to get, we give implicit permission for the sellers > to bombard us with neato ads, for things we don't want, well, don't > bug us with any info?
The difference between spam and traditional advertising is that with traditional advertising, the seller pays for the advertising. With spam, it's the receiver of the advertising that pays. A spammer pays about the same to send to 1,000 or 10,000 potential customers. Someone receiving spam pays with time and the extra ISP overhead because of bigger mail storage and serving needs. I think the ultimate solution to spam will be some sort of micro-payment scheme in which it costs perhaps a fraction of a cent to send an e-mail. This will go unnoticed by most of us, but will end up costing spammers real money when they start sending a million messages. I'm sure the ISPs would like to start collecting 1/100 cent for every message sent through their servers. | The next meeting of the Louisville Computer Society will | be August 26. The LCS Web page is <http://www.kymac.org>. | This list's page is <http://erdos.math.louisville.edu/macgroup>.
