What if spam were to disappear?
Posted by multippt
Email spam is just as annoying as it is important. It’s just plain interesting that some spammers are incredible at making “services” to irritate the hell out of people. Yet, spam is here despite it being a thorn to everyone’s (except the spammer’s) side.
Spam may disappear one day
The day we hope that will probably never come…, well, there is still hope.
Falling click-through
It’s no longer 1995, it’s 2007/8 - I mean, who would open spam messages for more than 10 seconds, if at all? The click-through rate (CTR) has fallen beyond recovery for spam. To compensate for this, spammers now send over 5 times the amount of spam, hoping that some person will click on that piece of junk. Sure, click-through rate was high way back a decade ago, but today it’s downright less than 0.5%.
If click-through rate were to decrease even more than the rate spam increases, spam will one day be a non-profitable subject - especially if spam were to negate the reputation of the promoted site. People rather report spam than read them, I mean, isn’t it a nice idea that you can get back at something that irritates you? The problem with spam is spam itself. In a bid to increase impressions, they send more, which ironically irritates people into not even bothering with spam.
Perfecting spam detection
What does a basic email account 10 years ago come with? Space and a trash bin. What does a basic email account today come with? Space and spam protection. With spam protection comes millions placed in funding to get rid of spam from everyone’s mail boxes. Sadly, because spam filtering is not perfected, false positives have a habit of appearing which gives spammers a light of hope, well, maybe that light only lasted for 5 seconds.
Dangerous spam
Sounds like spammers decided to go more creative, deciding to steal personal information aside from email addresses. The side-effect is that thanks to phishing, no one will now even dare touch “spam”, who knows? A carefully-crafted virus might just pop out. A big boo-boo against spam advertising products, caused by spammers themselves.
CAN-SPAM
According to this act, not all spam are spam. Great? We still receive spam, but at least it is legalized spam. Glad to see that “opt-out” link… who knows? Maybe if we click it we may just get less spam, not! Well, hopefully CAN-SPAM may be able to spur illegal spamming into legalized ones, offering an opportunity to opt out of spamming lists.
What if spam really disappear?
Spammers will have to look for new jobs, anti-spam companies need to look for new niches. Spam and its prevention is a multi-billion dollar industry. Well, actually the prevention part costs a little more, partly because spam is relentless in nature and utilizes black-hat ways, while anti-spam is generally powered by commercialism (let’s not forget that not many people will not want to study spam for free) and generally bounded by rules . Let’s hope that anti-spammers themselves won’t be spamming people just to stay in business. Then again, the definition of spam may change, so spam today may not be spam later. Commercial companies are already taking advantage of legal spamming, so what about the future?
Then again, it would be a nice feeling if there were to be no spam at all. No more spam checking. No more irrelevant emails. But, if we have grown used to spam, would we be able to deal with the absence of it? (Of course!)
