Good Faith Spam

There's an unexamined, unintended—but potentially serious, time-consuming, and costly—drawback to e-mail postage.

by Rebecca Lieb [March 4, 2004]

Rebecca Lieb is executive editor of the ClickZ Network. She has held executive marketing and communications positions at strategic e-services consultancies, including Siegelgale. She worked in the same capacity for global entertainment and media companies including Universal Television & Networks Group (formerly USA Networks International) and Bertelsmann's German network, RTL Television. As a journalist, Rebecca has written on media for numerous publications, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and spent five years as Variety's German/Eastern European bureau chief. Lieb also teaches an online publishing course at New York University.

How much would it have cost legitimate e-mailers and marketers had they paid "postage" to send the tens of thousands of unsolicited messages I received from them this month?

Most messages weren't, strictly speaking, what many would define as spam. Torrents of virus warnings and other autoresponders were triggered by the MyDoom virus, which (like most contemporary viruses) spoofs messages from everyone in an infected PC's Outlook contact list. Roughly half my mail consisted of automatic responses to e-mail I never sent.

To keep things interesting, a malicious bot was meanwhile busily opting a ClickZ Network e-mail alias into literally thousands of Yahoo! Groups, and hundreds more e-newsletters. Each "opt-in" resulted in either a confirmation e-mail or (from less-enlightened publishers) a full-fledged, unsolicited subscription. All the e-mail messages were sent in the good faith the address owner had legitimately opted in.

As this not-strictly-speaking spam snafued our servers, e-mail "postage" (charging bulk senders a per-message fee to ensure delivery) was booted into the limelight. Bill Gates talked it up in Davos. ISPs such as MSN, AOL and Yahoo! confirmed they're investigating the option.

The pros and cons of stamped e-mail are being seriously debated (read Hans-Peter Brøndmo's excellent column). What no one's talking about is this sort of "good-faith spam." It poses a serious stumbling block to e-mail postage (and even to bonded sender programs such as Vanquish and IronPort).

This hasn't been addressed. It hadn't even been considered by any of over a dozen ISPs, marketers, e-mail vendors, or architects of paid e-mail systems I've spoken with. None have worked out how good-faith spam, triggered by viruses, autoresponders, and opt-in bots, would be dealt with once commercial senders agree to pay per-message postage.

As usual, the problem is less about getting the good guys under control than it is about stopping bad guys from exploiting the system. Stamped e-mail does have merit. But if the bad guys can use it to wring money out of enemies or competitors, or simply to wreak havoc, paid e-mail is unlikely to achieve signification adoption—or a second chance.

That's bad for legitimate mailers, who want their messages delivered and opened. It's bad for ISPs seeking a revenue stream to help combat spam. It's bad for consumers who want to cut through e-mail clutter and avoid higher access fees.

"Bots will torpedo the whole concept of paid e-mail," said one techie, who notes the programs that spoof opt-ins are simple enough to be written by 14-year-old coders.

"It's such a complex issue. From Microsoft's point of view, there are not answers to that right now," admitted a company spokesman. He confirms levying micropayments on senders is a solution the company is looking into, "but that's the least developed. You will not see anything from Microsoft on micropayments for at least a year."

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