Chairman Bill Gates writes a letter advocating a combination of law and self-regulation by the industry to stop unwanted e-mail. [CNET News.com Entertainment & Media]
First – here’s a link to the Bill Gates Letter.
While the ADV subject line would be easy to filter for unsolicited emails, it would also completely kill any and all attempts for legit acquisition marketing. The average consumer does not truly understand how their name might be sold or traded through a list broker, nor do they really want to.
If, as a marketer we decide to purchase a list of likely candidate (legally of course), we might now expect to get an extremely low response rate which in effect would kill that aspect of marketing. Customer communications seem easy to maintain with this proposed regulation, but unless someone devises a new way for “customer introduction marketing” a new message from a third party seems to be something that will automatically be filtered to junk.
As someone who gets a great deal of spam – 101 messages since I left the office at 7pm last night, I can certainly appreciate wanting it to go away, and for penalties for those who are blatant abusers. I just don’t see why a solid filter can’t be deployed that can work on a massive level. My use of POPFile has literally gotten 100 of the 101 messages in the last 13 hours. I think that is pretty amazing, and something many others would get a great deal of use from. We just need it installed at the server level, not the user level since it is way to complex a system for mass adoption.