The Price of Spam

As someone who has spent a considerable amount of time and money learning how to attract quality traffic to my Web sites, I often get asked why it is that I am so against the concept of spam, or UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email)

UCE is the leading complaint of Internet users. But junk e-mail (as I prefer to think of it) is more than just annoying, it costs Internet users and Internet-based businesses millions, even billions, each year.

Junk e-mail is "postage due" marketing. It's like a telemarketer calling you collect. The economics of junk e-mail encourages massive abuse. It doesn't cost much to get into the business of junk e-mailing, so the volume of spam is increasing every day.

As Vint Cerf, Senior Vice President, MCI, and acknowledged "Father of the Internet" said - "...Spamming is the scourge of electronic-mail and newsgroups on the Internet. It can seriously interfere with the operation of public services, to say nothing of the effect it may have on any individual's e-mail mail system. ... Spammers are, in effect, taking resources away from users and service suppliers without compensation and without authorization."

And so the war on spam is being fought by all of us who believe in fair play. If somebody decides to drop junk mail in my mailbox at home, though it may be thoroughly annoying, at least they don't demand that I pay them for the privilege of delivering it!

Spammers are doing EXACTLY that. They are dumping junk into your mailbox and stealing the money out of your purse to pay for it.

The battle now, is to try and make email useless for spam before spam makes email useless for communication.

With one simple email account, a junk emailer can send one message to millions of recipients, turning that message into hundreds, even thousands of Megabytes of data. While it may only cost a junk mailer a tiny amount to send the spam, it costs individuals and their Internet Service Providers countless millions of dollars in lost time, lost money, extra staff hours, damaged equipment, lost productivity, and lost business opportunities.

And by heck it's annoying!

So how do we beat the spammers?

First of all, let me say that no amount of government legislation is going to beat spam. There are too many governments in the world who don't see it as a problem and anyway there are too many inexpensive pieces of software to cloak the spammer's true identity.

There are, however, five easy steps that ALL of us can take to eliminate spam:

1. Remind yourself that SPAM=SCAM! Don't let a slick presentation fool you. If it was a genuine business, they wouldn't need to use spam.

2. NEVER reply to a spammer. Tempting though it is to fire back at them, they welcome your return mail because it confirms that your mail box is live. If you respond, your spam levels will increase.

3. ALWAYS report them if there is a means to do so. (See http://www.cauce.org/ for more details.)

4. If you can afford it, get yourself a good spam filter. As spammers see their percentage of non-delivered junk increase, they may decide that the cost is just not worth it.

5. This is the BIG one...

Make yourself a promise now. Swear to yourself that you will NEVER, NEVER, EVER purchase anything that was introduced to you by a spammer. Throw that darn junk in the trash before you even read it.

When the Internet community stop buying from spammers, spammers will stop stealing from us.

About the Author

Graham Hamer produces the TopProfits weekly ezine of Internet Marketing. His ebook The Secret Goldmine can be downloaded from http://www.unique-book.com/ and a collection of some of the Internet's best names are listed on his site at websites.com

graham.hamer@noos.fr
http://www.www-websites.com