Phil Raymond of Vanquish Labs contends that bulk e-mailers should be required to put up a bond that e-mail recipients can tap if they get messages they don’t want.
Vanquish reportedly plans to introduce software that can detect whether the sender has posted a cash bond. Messages that include the bond would be sent directly to the recipient without passing through spam filters. If the recipient doesn’t want the message, he or she can reject it and get a portion of the sender’s bond, which is likely to be in the five-cent range.
According to Raymond, spammers and legitimate marketers will be less likely to send mass e-mail if rejection costs them money. Raymond also claims that marketers would be more careful to target their e-mails at people who want them.
The idea is interesting—and gets wackier and wackier the more closely it’s scrutinized.
First, it is impossible to predict how recipients of a pitch will react, no matter how carefully planned or “relevant” it is.
Imagine the chilling effect of letting unpredictable, hair-trigger consumers decide when marketers should pay for e-mail—messages they signed up for, by the way. Accidentally annoying subject line? Kaching! Offering sale pricing on something the recipient just bought? Kaching!
Also, letting consumers decide when bulk e-mailers should pay allows for way too many shenanigans.
Companies could have employees sign up for competitors’ mailings just to drain the competitors’ bonds.
Teens could sign up for lists solely to press the “Make Them Pay” button.
And think about the ramifications for groups like Moveon.org. The liberal group is the loudest critic of AOL’s implementation of Goodmail, where marketers can pay to have their e-mail certified as non-spam and guaranteed delivered with graphics and links intact.
If Moveon.org were to put up a bond for the Vanquish system, every gun-toting conservative across the land would only be too happy to sign up for mailings again, and again and again—no matter how many times Moveon.org removed them—so they could ding the activist group for as much bond money as possible.
And in any case, consumers simply don’t deserve money for accepting e-mail. They’re paying little to nothing for their e-mail boxes as it is. Internet service providers are the ones suffering as a result of spam. If anyone deserves cash resulting from receiving spam, it’s them. The potential resulting improvements in e-mail service from ISPs getting more cash would certainly be preferable to a nickel here and a nickel there all because an ad campaign failed to hit the mark.
Letting consumers decide whether or not a mailer should pay is a clunker of an idea that can’t die too soon.
