Spam Legitimacy

Kudos to Anne Mitchell for catching the story at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/spam/story/0,13427,1187654,00.html

While she centers on the portion of the story that occurred at the ISIPP Spam & the Law Conference held this past January in San Francisco (and rightfully so since she did a wonderful job of putting it together), the real story here is the struggle for legitimacy.

There was once, in fact, a time when people thought that they could get away with sending unsolicited pitches via email — if they were “legitimate” (that is, not for porn, pills, or piracy).

But that was then. This is now.

Now we have the Pew Report on the Internet and American Life which tells us that users are starting to use email less as a result of spam. It also tells us people are less trusting of email in general.

Thus, even things that people have actually asked to recieve are being trusted less.

This is not a good development. If you depend on people reading and responding to email then you want them to find email in general to be a trustworthy medium. It’s the same as if people suddenly decided that the newspaper was no longer trustworthy.

The solution is to get rid of the part that people don’t trust: spam.

Thus, we have meetings between ISPs and mailers. If they can come to an agreement on how mailings are best done then perhaps trust in the medium will be restored and the commercialization of the Internet can continue.