Rich Kulawiec wrote:
> The "B" stands for Bulk. The cost involved is not relevant.
Rich, I will defer to your expertise on UBE versus UCE, though I have to
confess I have not seen that term before, or perhaps not recognized it.
However, I am not particularly active in the anti-spamming effort, because
I feel that playing an elaborate game of fox and hounds is for others,
younger and more technically oriented than I, though I'm quite happy to
benefit from their labors, so if that's where it comes from, I would
probably not have seen it previously.
(And I suspect the word 'spam' is here to stay, anyway, despite disagreements
over its precise definition.)
I disagree that the cost factor is irrelevant. If it cost bulk e-mailers
10 cents per message to do it, or even ONE cent, we probably wouldn't be
having this whole discussion, would we?
But if it cost one cent each for me to send out my mailing list traffic,
with over 500,000 messages delivered (traffic x subscribers) in a busy
month, I probably wouldn't be doing what I do, either, at least not the
way it currently functions.
That's why I'd like to see some kind of economic pricing model for
net traffic. Unsolicited messages are paid for by the sender, solicited
messages could be paid for by the recipient.
I've asked, many of my subscribers would WILLINGLY pay one cent per message
delivered, should such a facility be possible, though some would undoubtably
go away and others would move over to my lower-volume news-only subset.
Sender based content filtering would likely become more of a necessity
under such a transfer of payments system, too.
Example: I run two sports lists, and this Wednesday is national letter
of intent signing day in football, so that topic dominates both lists
ever January and early February.
Yet there are some subscribers who don't have much interest in whether
Joe High School is said to be leaning towards this school or that,
they'd rather read about when spring practice starts, whether Notre Dame will
be on the schedule in a few year, etc. So, a mailing list management system
that recognizes which messages are about recruiting and sends them only to
the subscribers who have requested recruiting traffic messages in their
profile would seem highly desirable. (Actually, I'd like such a beast
NOW, anybody know of one?)
And if was somehow possible for the author of list traffic to share the
cost of distributing those messages, I suspect a lot of the flamefest traffic
would go away quickly, too.
And the cost allocation information could be used as a sorting factor
in mail readers, mail I _paid_ to receive would certainly go towards
the top of my list, mail I didn't solicit towards the bottom.
--
Mike Nolan
