A few years ago there was a really cheesy advert in the UK for a particular brand of budget chocolates called Ferrero Rocher. The 'ambassador’s reception' film became extremely famous over here. With its poorly dubbed and outrageously banal soundtrack, it broke all the rules. It was so bad it was good - and the product flew off the shelves.

Two very interesting articles caught my eye recently. The first, in the August issue of the UK magazine, Prospect, discussed the idea that the way to avoid spam was to charge senders a tax for every email they send. The author, eminent lawyer and businessman Edward Gottesman, argued that the financial disincentive would immediately deter people from sending unwanted messages.

Aside from the huge number of technical and legal issues this raises, which are all demolished quite nicely on the Prospect blog, it seemed to me that the article missed the most glaringly obvious point.

Spam exists because it works.

If people didn’t think that they could probably get their drugs cheaper, or that there was a lottery ticket just waiting with their name on it, then the whole river would dry up.

But, as stated in the lovely Yorkshire phrase quoted in my blog post title: there is nothing in the world as strange - and unpredictable, and irrational, and plain stupid - as people.

I was therefore both pleased and frightened to read the recent research report from the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG). They recently undertook a survey of Internet users across the US and Canada, and asked them about their attitudes towards unsolicited email messages.

To quote one of the findings:

"Nearly half of all respondents say they have never clicked on what they felt was spam. Those who did click on spam say they either made a mistake, are not sure why they did it, sent a note to the company, or were interested in the product or service."

And it’s that last phrase that really bothers me. Up to half the recipients admitted that they had responded to spam where they were interested in what was being offered - even when they knew that it was a message that they believed to be unsolicited.

To my mind, we don’t need to be wasting time discussing email taxes - or inventing ever-stronger punishments for spammers. What has to happen is a huge public attention-raising campaign to educate people about email. It won’t be able to lay down the law about what exactly is spam and what isn’t - but it should seek to help people understand some of the consequences that arise from buying things that you learn about in an email from someone you have never heard from before.

Either we have to accept that spam is going to always be with us, or we have to tackle the problem at its root and try to change attitudes.

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About the Author

Kieran Cooper is senior manager of support services for Lyris' international operations. Located in the Lyris UK office, he is responsible for account management, implementation and support.

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