For me, any given day starts with an electronic invasion from marketers. The subject lines of their emails read like National Enquirer headlines: "STOCK ALERTS!" "Happiness Herbs" "Alternative to Viagra." Translated another way: "greed," "drugs" and "sex."
Spam in its worst incarnations appeals to our basest interests, which, thankfully, makes it easy to recognize without even opening.
Delete. Delete. Delete.
It sounds like an easy enough process, but why does the burden to prevent spam lie with consumers like me and not with the marketers profiting from it? I never inquired about hot stock tips, the latest herbs that send you flying high or sexual enhancers.
And when these messages first started flowing into my work email account, I was offended. What if I were unlucky enough to work at a company that monitored all my emails and decided these were an inappropriate use of company resources? I would face the burden of explaining their presence.
Quite frankly, I have no idea why I receive spam at work. My best guess is that one of the dozens of tech conferences I've attended has sold my information to mass marketing lists.
None of that should matter, though. There's no good reason for spamming. It should be outlawed outright. Congressional efforts, in addition to state ones, are under way to limit spam. The US Senate began hearings this week on a bill that, among other things, would require those sending commercial emails to include a working return address and a way to opt out of future mailings.
That sounds reasonable, but it doesn't go far enough. Why should I--or anyone else--have to police the spammers? The email shouldn't be sent unless requested.
Sending the wrong message.
A law predicated on enforcing opt-out provisions sends a message to marketers that it's OK to send unwanted emails in the first place. Instead, any new anti-spamming law should require that companies and individuals only send commercial emails when the recipients have agreed to accept them--whether by checking a box on a Web form or requesting information through some other channel.
Spammers don't need any more encouragement or protection. They're already combing posts on Newsgroups, using bots to grab email addresses off online auctions and portal-site personal profiles, and buying lists from e-commerce companies, according to David Ferris, president of Ferris Research, in San Francisco.
Today their juvenile missives may number only a couple a day for most people. But Ferris predicts a day soon, maybe by 2005, when spam emails will far outnumber legitimate ones. I'm sure this phenomenon is already the case for some consumers, who may have been fooled by the convoluted opt-in/opt-out process of even the most legitimate Web businesses.
The problem extends far beyond purveyors of mysterious herbal remedies. Some of the country's largest companies seem more than happy to confuse consumers into agreeing to accept their email marketing messages--and to have their names provided to others.
I learned that spamming dangers lurk even when you're trying to do something like file taxes online. I used Intuit's TurboTax on the Web to file my 2000 return. In the process of signing up, I noticed one line highlighted as a link that read, "Change my privacy preferences."
Being curious, I clicked. Another window popped up requiring me to input my personal information all over again in order to opt-out of receiving Intuit's promotions not only by email but by mail and phone.
Intuit's tactic isn't uncommon. By fooling consumers into agreeing to accept their marketing messages, they can claim to be innocent of spam.
Even when an opt-out message is clear, it doesn't always work--at least quickly. My employer, eWEEK, is a perfect example. When the publication started a series of online newsletters recently, I and other writers received angry emails from readers who couldn't unsubscribe to the newsletters. The problem, apparently, lies in getting an outside newsletter provider to efficiently process opt-out requests.
The time has come for the burden to shift. Enough of the delete key. Make spammers think twice before hitting send on that "hot" email offer.
