Spam is evil. Unsolicited email, SMS messages, Faxes and
intrusions into bulletin boards (like this one) are inexcusable and
damned annoying. These days they have also become expensive and,
to an extent, debilitating. Networks are getting overloaded,
people are finding they need to trawl through more and more crap to
find the useful stuff, and the spam filters are still occasionally
misdirecting legitimate traffic. All in all, spam sux.
So, the question is being asked "How can we stop spam?". The
answers are many and varied. They range from spam filters on
email accounts to secure email systems to the pay as you send model
that will make sending spam expensive. All of these are
interesting, and all will go some way towards removing the
problem. Unfortunately, all will be circumvented at some
point. So, let's ask another question instead. Let's ask,
"Why does spam exist?". The obvious answer is because it is a
very cheap way of advertising. This is true. Mind you,
standing up in your bedroom and yelling the name of a product is also a
very cheap way of advertising, but that isn't so popular. And why
not? Because it doesn't work. Which leads us to the
point of this rant: Spam exists because spam works! The
reason we have spam, is because people respond to the adverts, people
buy stuff from them (or at least visit the web site, which is supported
by some other form of advertising). Spam would not exist if
people did not read it. This is a simple fact. The only
reason Mc Donalds gets its staff to say "Would you like fries with
that?" is because some people say yes. If everyone said no, or
better yet, got so annoyed they walked out, the practice would stop
overnight.
We get annoyed at so many things, and try to find clever, expensive
ways to make them go away, when, in the end, we created the problem in
the first place.
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