[Gllug] Paying to send email..

[Nix]

On Mon, 6 Feb 2006, David Damerell whispered secretively:
> I hope it will make them *less* money once it is realised that what
> they are doing is letting people sign up to spam their users. This
> particular implementation of this scheme is aimed, fairly clearly, at
> spammers who want to cast a thin cloak of respectability over
> themselves; they'll call it "legitimate email marketing" and they
> won't be pimping anything actively illegal. Not the first time we've
> seen this one, either.

Yeah, it looks like a half-implementation of bonded sender schemes to
me. If the trusted senders have to deposit a sizeable bond in advance,
well, *that* will work, save AOL lots of CPU time and so on.

(The idea of such schemes isn't `must pay to send email'; it's rather
`you put up some cash on the assurance that you won't spam our users,
and we skip spamscanning your mails; if we get spam complaints, you
sacrifice the bond'. If they're smart, they'll *still* spam-scan, say,
1% of email from those senders, so they can determine for themselves
if they are due for a bond-sacrificing LART.)

> Who would be most likely to want their messages not sent through spam
> filters? People who aren't sending spam have a small worry about false
> positives.

Actually a lot of newsletters have a *lot* of spam signs, and if you're
sending a newsletter that recipients have actually *paid* for, and it
looks quite spammy... (and yes, this is depressingly common).

>            People who _are_ sending spam have a large worry about
> non-false positives. Who can most afford to pay to send email? People
> who expect to make money off the email.

If you lose ten thousand quid in forfeited bond every time you spam, you
won't be able to keep it up for long (not least because if you do it
more than once or twice AOL won't accept a bond from you again for love
nor money).

> It won't have any effect on regular mail to AOL and Yahoo users, which
> will remain incredibly flaky and unreliable - no change there.

*splorf*

-- 
`... follow the bouncing internment camps.' --- Peter da Silva
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug