Not all unsolicited email is SPAM
SPAM messages are the scourge of the internet. The people that send out this garbage are nothing short of thieves, as in almost all cases they hijack servers and steal bandwidth in order to spread their disease around the digital planet. However, not all unsolicited email falls into this category, and much of it may be perfectly legitimate.
As far as email accounts go, the owner of the account should have the right to say: “I don’t want to receive any unsolicited email”. Not that that is likely to be possible anytime soon, but the right should be theirs nonetheless. That right ends the moment you publish your email address in a public place, as by doing so you are inviting others to contact you, whether you know them or not.
In the business world there is a place for carefully targetted email marketing, and indeed I use this medium with great success. Here are my rules: send one email to one person at a time, only after considering the suitability of your service to their business. I write my emails with great care and I only send to businesses that are local to me geographically. A very small percentage of these recipients then feel it is appropriate to “flame” me in return. The fact that these supposed professionals cannot differentiate between some idiot selling “vjiag ra” and me, a local business offering a valid service, is something of a concern. That they feel also that email is a medium that they can use to bully and abuse others, is also deeply worrying.
As the internet is clearly the future of business, I find myself wondering just how we will be able to successfully market ourselves to each other. Without unsolicited marketing, businesses will fail and the global economy will suffer.
What is needed is a simple verification process that occurs each time you send an email to someone new. A mutual exchange of credentials can occur, and the recipient can decide whether or not he or she wishes to recieve email from this source. Much like the way you can choose who can contact you via your MSN or AIM instant messenger, you could decide who to add to your email “buddies” list. Whilst there are some systems that try to do this now, the internet as a whole must adopt this kind of technology in order to wipe out SPAM.
Further, our legal systems need to do more to capture and punish spammers and bandwidth thieves with each country responsible for so doing. Countries that fail to adequately prevent spam, would be blacklisted from the global internet. Such a bold move would iradicate SPAM coming from dedicated server farms in places like Indonesia. The cost to a country’s economy from a global internet ban would be enormous, and a huge motivation for the respective governments to be a bit more heavy handed.
What is clearly also needed is education. The internet is full of new users who are both IT illiterate and completely unaware of basic “netiquette”. ISPs could do more to help in this scenario, by creating clear anti-SPAM policies of their own, but making allowance for genuine business email activity that some people misconstrue as SPAM. Using the word “SPAM”, with all of its negative connotations, as a blanket term for unsolicited email needs to stop. After all, if no-one was able to send unsolicited email, how would you ever hear from that long lost schoolfriend, or that potential new employee.
Your comments are most welcome.