Wed, Feb 25 2004

Pay Me To Read Spam--I Dare You

I loathe spam as much as the next person, but if you have a name that includes characters that occur in a certain sequence, you may be greatly inconvenienced when it come to spam filters seeing your name as a forbidden 4-letter word. Mark Lewis talks about the Can Spam Act being a joke to the most dedicated of spammers. And while the law may have formed in the U.S., policing the whole planet presents a bit of difficulty.

I hear that Microsoft talks about a possible future plan that would make spammers have to agree to pony up a few cents in order to be able to send spam to each recipient. While I have no idea how this could possibly be put into practice (without a complete overhaul of the way email works), from a personal standpoint it would ease the burden a lot more if I knew the payment went to the actual recipient--that would be me--instead of to an ISP or some other third party. It would put a new face on the idea some of those online sites touted that claimed you could "get paid to read email".

I'm just dreaming at this point. But if I could actually get three cents for every piece of spam I received, and spam continued to come in at its current level, I could probably pay off the balance of our mortgage in a fairly short time. Ok. Sign me up!

posted at: 11:56 | category: /Miscellaneous | link to this entry