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At last,
the contents of Aardvark's "million-dollar ideas" notebook
are revealed for all to see!
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Am I crazy?
Yep, probably.
Why am I suggesting that we help spammers -- those most vile of creatures who
seem to make it their life's mission to fill your email box with their
unwanted, undesirable and often offensive solicitations?
Well let me clarify my position.
I'm not suggesting for a moment that we endorse or support the sending of
unsolicited commercial email to the millions of addresses that fill those
$29.95 "super deal" CDROMs.
However, we have to acknowledge that politicians (certainly in the USA
where most spam originates) simply don't seem to understand what a
PITA spam can be, and often seem more interested in protecting the rights
of the spammers than those of the recipients.
So here's my idea.
Let the spammers offer everyone a free email address.
If they offer everyone their choice of free email address at a domain such
as YouCanSpamMe.com or similar, then those Net users who really don't
mind this garbage in their mailbox (and if you believe the spammers and the
DMA then there are millions of them) will be able to sign up -- clearly
signaling that they're willing to accept spam.
Now, the direct-email-marketing and spammer communities could fire away,
pouring as many emails as they wanted at any @YouCanSpamMe.com address -- safe
in the knowledge that nobody would get upset.
The politicians could pass a very simple law -- spam anything other than
an @YouCanSpamMe.com address and you get your backside kicked.
Of course the spammers would have to foot the bill for running the mailboxes
and mailserver required to support all those @YouCanSpamMe.com addresses
and coping with the massive waves of worthless offers that will be flowing
in -- but, since you only have to ask any of the spamware merchants to realise
that spamming is hugely profitable, they can afford to.
Now surely this idea is utopia?
Signing up for an @YouCanSpamMe.com email account would require you to
specify some demographics, likes, interests, age, etc (but your name could
be optional for privacy reasons) so the direct marketers could actually start
targeting their offers!
The cost of running the service could even be offset by offering a "box-drop"
service whereby spammers could connect to the YouCanSpamMe.com servers and
send a single message to (for instance) all those interested in increasing
the length of their male member or losing 50 KGs in 35 minutes.
Would I sign up for such a free email service?
Hell yes!
Would I ever check my @YouCanSpamMe.com mailbox?
Hell no!
But that shouldn't worry the spammers -- because I already heavily filter
my email and delete all spam on sight anyway, so they wouldn't be missing
out on anything.
What do you think?
Yep, DSL Will Bust Your Wallet -- Some More
I've received more emails which indicate that Telecom's JetStream really
has become a wallet-buster for more than a tiny number of users who have
been hit with denial of service attacks.
Still no official comment from Telecom though.
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