It is apparent that those who believe that sending unsolicited commercial email (UCE, "spam", or "junk email") is an acceptable business practice, and who have expressed this opinion here, are not listening to those of us who object to it.
It is understandable that some would embrace UCE as a valid way of contacting potential customers.
Let me tell you why it is not.
First, as others have written, UCE is unlike traditional direct marketing sales using surface mail. First, the cost of surface mail is borne entirely by the advertiser. The cost of unsolicited commercial email is borne mostly by the Internet Service Providers and the email recipient.
Direct costs accrue to the ISP who must purchase additional bandwidth to the Internet backbone in order to handle the increased traffic, additional disk to handle the data, and additional processing power to handle the additional extended connection time due to downloading junk email. All of which eventually get passed back to the consuming public.
There is a proposal now before the FCC to allow the telcos to charge ISPs a per minute charge for their phone lines. Longer phone calls mean longer connect times, and increased costs that will be passed to the ISP customer, if this is approved.
Direct costs to the email recipient include increased connect time with the ISP (for those who are charged connect time), additional phone charges for longer phone calls, and increased personal storage space on the ISP-provided storage as well as personal storage on the users desktop. I get billed if my mailbox's size exceeds my storage allowance at my ISP.
And by the way, my delete button only works AFTER I have downloaded my mail, for those of you say to simply delete it. This is AFTER it accumulates on my mailbox on my ISP's system, and AFTER I had to down load it.
These costs are real. And they are not trivial when one considers that the current bulk email distributors claim to be able to mail to 8 million addresses at the rate of 250,000 per day; day after day. Junk email operators get a free ride that the rest of us pay for.
Cost shifting may seem like a good idea to the advertiser, but making the intermediate nodes and the receivers pay to receive it is clearly unethical. It is the one singular reason why the experienced email user objects to it.
If bulk surface mail came postage due, you would object to it too!
If the telemarketer called you collect and the phone company forced you to accept the charges, you would object to it as well.
The are three other reasons that UCE is an unacceptable method of marketing:
The first is the current use of email relays to distribute the advertising. An email relay is an intermediate mail server that is used to forward email to a final destination. They were used in the early days to improve delivery reliability. Today, the bulk email distributor uses them to
1. Hide the source of the advertisement.
2. Insure that his message is not blocked or filtered by potential customers who do not wish to read UCE.
The bulk email distributors use email relays in order to hide the source of the email, not just to avoid "flames" -- although this is one reason it is done, but to prevent the receiver from using filters to block the incoming junk email. Known spammers get quickly blocked by ISPs and email recipients on the basis of the source server's address. Blocked junk email means that the message was not read, and consequently, there cannot be a sale.
So they use the servers of a third party to distribute the advertisements.
By inserting their traffic onto the servers owned by others for redistribution, the bulk email distributors avoid being identified by the domain that ultimately receives the advertisement. This gets the message through -- which is what the bulk email operator was hired to do.
But what they also do is commit a theft of service. They use other people's property, without compensation, to transmit a commercial message. There is no other way to put it -- by using email relays, the bulk email distributors are stealing resources that they do not own.
I submit that theft of service makes UCE unacceptable.
The second reason that UCE is unacceptable is that the bulk email distributor hides the source of the advertisements that he sends by using falsified email headers. Again, the bulk email distributor does this not only to deflect flames, but to evade filters that would block delivery, and to prevent email administrators from tracing the sender back to the origination point.
It is nearly universal among the bulk email distributors to use a completely false return address. In almost every case, they use a return address that implies that it came from a completely different source. Sometimes, by chance, sometimes, by design, the forged addresses are valid, but not that of the actual originator.
If the address is one for a valid user, that user usually loses their service either because they are presumed to be guilty of sending UCE or because their inbox got too large due to so many reverse protest messages.
If the return address is invalid, the reply will "bounce" which results in administrative overhead by the postmasters of the two domains involved.
But not for the bulk email distributor. It is not his operation that is impacted, after all.
Another tactic of the bulk email distributor is to insert falsified trace headers (those "Received:" ones) into an email message. Savvy mail administrators can read email headers and identify the insertion point of the email. The bulk email distributor tries to foil this by forging these headers to misdirect the email administrator. The typical forged "Received:" header has a false machine name inserted as the origination point to deliberately misidentify it. Some times they insert a completely bogus "Received:" header that falsely identifies another machine on another network as the source of the UCE.
Perhaps the bulk email distributors think this is harmless. Let me dis-abuse them of that notion.
I recently discussed this subject with a small company whose domain name appeared in one of these falsified headers in a UCE I received. They received over 1100 email complaints for being the source of UCE in just a few hours. They were innocent; they were victims. It actually came from another source (one of Cyber Promotion's customers) via UUNet. But the email headers were falsified to make it appear that they were responsible. They were seriously impacted in their ability to conduct business and it tied up their resources in dealing with this large amount of email in their queue.
A few months ago, another innocent ISP was literally knocked off the net because of the complaint traffic they received. You can read about this at http://www.ca-probate.com/yuri.htm in a document titled "How IBM.NET Almost Died."
I submit to you all, actions by bulk email distributors that have this impact are clearly unethical and unacceptable. In fact, it could properly be classified as a computer crime; specifically a "denial of service" attack which is induced by their actions.
The third and final reason that UCE is unacceptable is that the repeated transmission of unwanted commercial communication is harassment. This is especially true when the sender continues to contact the receiver after the receiver asks to be left alone.
In the telemarketing world, such contact is a violation of the Telecommunications Privacy Act of 1991 -- in many states is a misdemeanor criminal act, as well -- that could result in significant fines and court costs.
In the surface mail world, a receiver of surface mail can demand that the sender no longer contact them, and in some cases, the Postal Service can enforce this with criminal penalties.
Yet, in the bulk email world, requests to be left alone are routinely ignored.
In spite of what some of you who distribute junk email say, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times that a remove request was honored. And in spite of the promise that some messages are a "one time mailing", I get many of the same "one time mailings" over and over again.
It should be noted here, that since I have *NOT* consented to receiving *any* UCE, even so-called "one time mailings" are unwanted and unacceptable.
Because of forged email addresses, and false domain addresses and phone numbers in the Internic database, many times there is no one to complain to. How convenient!
I submit that the "drive-by" distribution practices of the bulk emailers constitutes harassment as well the repetitive re-emailing of the advertisement. I submit that repeated harassment is another reason that UCE is unacceptable.
With all these reasons as to why junk email is unacceptable, I cannot understand why some businesses even consider mass emailings. If it is unethical -- and in some instances, outright theft of service, to distribute it -- why would an organization purporting to be an "Internet Better Business Bureau" equivocate or hesitate to universally condemn the practice, regardless of the number or size of the messages? All UCE is unacceptable, even if distributed only once.
Ladies and gentlemen, rest assured that I will never do business with someone who uses UCE to communicate with me. How could I trust a business who uses stolen services, and who causes innocent third parties to be seriously impacted by the distribution of their advertisement?
And why on earth would I do business with someone who offends me with repeated unsolicited advertisements, refuses to honor my requests to be removed from his email list, who sends me messages in a "drive-by" fashion without recourse to complain, and who makes unwanted contact using the electronic version of the door-to-door salesman who sticks his foot in my front door preventing me from closing it?
Do you care so little about my good will?
Perhaps you should consider establishing a business relationship with your potential customers by creating voluntary sign up or preference lists. Then your advertisements would not be considered unsolicited.
In the mean time, I, for one, will be working to make the practice of unsolicited commercial email as illegal as unsolicited commercial faxes. I have been left no other choice.
Sign me: No junk email, pluh-eese!