From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Jul 15 2003 - 15:45:57 MDT
On Tue, Jul 15, 2003 at 01:44:36PM -0700, Mike Lorrey wrote:
>
> --- Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal@smigrodzki.org> wrote:
> > Benoit wrote:
> > ### What if you have to hit "delete" 200 times a day?
> >
> > There are people who do.
>
> I just had to abandon my old datamann.com address because spam
> constitutes about 75 messages a day to that inbox.
So little? :-) One of the drawbacks of having an old website with my
email address on nearly every page is that I'm in all spam databases.
I will likely move digitally shortly, so don't get surprised by a new
.net.persona (but I still don't know how to transfer the parts of my
mind that live in akira.nada.kth.se - that is even harder than moving
email).
> Spam itself is also a detriment to forming new relationships with
> strange people, contrary to Mr Benoit's arguments. These days, if I get
> a message from someone I don't know where the subject line doesn't say
> something I am specifically involved in, that message gets deleted as
> spam, whether it is or not. I don't have time to go through and figure
> out which ones are or are not spam. New people contacting me have
> little chance of getting my attention with some generic subject line.
This is IMHO the main problem of spam. I can delete spam quickly, but I
know some real mail does get lost, and it hurts. Of course, even the
email I get much gets lost in the huge pile of "important, better
consider a good answer"-email.
Spam is an attention drain, and that is its real crime. Attention is the
sole scarce resource these days for most us - with the aids of modern
society and technology almost any desire can be fulfilled, but we only
get 24 hours (minus sleep) of attention at best. Spam tries to grab
attention to get us into the desire, interest and action phases but
since the stuff advertised is of such dubious value it mainly wastes
attention of a huge group of people per "successful" customer.
The pay for email is IMHO an elegant solution (since it is not based on
fallible email filters, ineffectual and coercive spam laws or internet
disrupting black holing but by a voluntary change of the economics of
the situation), but I doubt it can easily be implemented unless we get
good micropayment aggregation systems (I read some papers about them,
and the cryptographics is wonderful and ingenious, but the economy and
sociology is far harder to solve).
Maybe one could do a crude version by having the person on the other end
do a confirmation; you email me, my exoself emails you a "Are you sure
you want to reach Anders?" (here there is need for some anti-bot
coding), and a reply causes the email to be forwarded to my main
mailbox. That seems to be far too cumbersome to work, although the
software is easy. Maybe an improvement is to use some IM that gives the
mailing person the question - that would likely save time and not
clutter the mailbox. But IMs are highly local and incompatible. And the
solution does get nicer with money involved.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Jul 15 2003 - 15:51:14 MDT