Read this excerpt from the Associated Press:
E-mail marketers trying to do the right thing by providing contact information and opt-out links are being driven underground by ISPs that kill their service, said Ronald Scelson, operator of Scelson Online Marketing.Scelson's company has been forced to disguise the sender information of the 180 million pieces of e-mail it sends daily, Scelson said. One carrier shut him off after receiving 1200 complaints, he said. But with a 1 percent response rate on the unsolicited commercial e-mail it sends, far more people buy the products advertised than complain about the spam, he said.
"Why do more people buy than complain about it?" Scelson asked. "If [the mail] is 100 percent legal, and [ISPs] get a single complaint, they will turn around and kill your circuit, so we go out of business or we're forced to forge the headers. The biggest complain is you can't find us. If you could, you're going to shut us down, so why should we let you find us?"
Some ISPs add to the amount spam costs U.S. busineses--estimated at $10 billion in 2003--by setting up spam filters that force bulk e-mailers to send one message at a time. The process eats additional bandwidth at both ends of the e-mail process.
Outlawing most commercial e-mail amounts to censorship, Scelson said, asking whether Congress will ban bulk postal mail as well.
"I'm told that there's a lot of cost factors in reading this e-mail," Scelson said. "When you read this e-mail, you go through and push 'delete.'" But with postal mail, he said, "you have to walk outside, take this junk mail out of the box, read this junk mail--have you thought about how much chemicals, pollution, and trees that are involved with this? And then you've got to throw it away."
While I partially agree with one of his ideas, standardized labels on spam - so that people can decide to ignore it all or receive it all by configuring their email clients - I seriously doubt that it could work. As soon as all email clients were updated with a standard protocol, Mr. Scelson would then claim, "They forced us to disguise our email as if it were not bulk mail, because everyone blocked it!" In my view, the only email this guy should be sending is from the prison library. His company single-handedly sends 180 million unsolicited emails a day? That's enough spam for every man, woman, and child in the US with access to the web!