Eclectical Engineering

Why do spammers send out their appeals via e-mail? Principally because it is very cheap for them. Why is it so cheap? Although bulk e-mail is not a particularly efficient medium for mass advertising (at least, not from a communications-theory point of view, as we will see), our current e-mail environment is set up so that the costs for its inefficiency tend to be shifted away from the sender and onto the recipients. So, although you may be angry about the sociopathic or criminal content of spam, or the need to spend your time and resources in order to deal with it, you are far more entitled to be angry about the fact that you pay for it. In this post, we’ll take a look at why this is true.

E-mail is a point-to-point medium

It should be obvious that electronic mail is a point-to-point (person-to-person) communications medium, just like postal mail. That is, one party (the sender) sends a payload (the e-mail packet) directly to another party (the recipient). That’s how it works — one sender, one packet, one recipient.

Of course, the sender can send the identical message to many people (either by putting more addresses in the To: or the cc: fields, or simply by retransmitting the same message over and over, each time to a new recipient), but each transmission is still a one-to-one affair. Each e-mail recipient gets his own distinct copy of the mail packet, just as each recipient of bulk postal mail gets his own personal copy of the coupon-pack or flyer or catalog.

In other words, if a spammer sends a mailing to a million recipients (a small number for many of these guys), then a million individual copies of the same mail packet will have to traverse the internet, one to each recipient.

Using a point-to-point medium for broadcasting is inefficient.

The term “broadcast e-mail” was once fashionable for describing e-mail marketing (including spam), but it is a bit of a misnomer: the broadcast e-mailer isn’t actually broadcasting anything, he is just making a very large number of individual point-to-point deliveries (of the identical packet) to a list of individual recipients. Because of all this duplication of data, using e-mail to send identical copies of messages to large groups of recipients (as the spammers do) is fundamentally inefficient. Many of the problems caused by spam come about because of this inefficiency - the need to distribute vast numbers of copies of the same information to equally vast numbers of recipients. Much of this inefficiency has to be dealt with by people other than the spammer (i.e., the recipients and their internet providers), who must expend time, resources, and money for which the spammer does not compensate them.

To understand this point a bit better, let’s look at some examples of true broadcasting:

• Advertising billboards and posters can be considered a kind of broadcast, since there’s only one copy of the billboard (or poster), but many recipients are exposed to it as they pass by. 
• Similarly, a radio or television program is also a broadcast, because there’s only one signal leaving the station’s antenna (or the cable operator’s head end), and everyone who watches or listens receives this same signal via their TV sets or radios.

There are also media in the real (non-internet) world that are traditionally point-to-point media, but are often used (inefficiently) for “broadcasting:”

• The telephone is not a broadcast medium. You can only call one other person at a time on the public network (or, at best, a small handful of people if you use some sort of conferencing service and can coordinate all these people). Using telephones for marketing or other mass-calling (such as the “robo-calling” that goes on every couple of years in the political seasons) requires that one call be placed at a time, serially. Even if the marketer uses a “boiler room” full of people (or robots) to do the calling, each of these can only call one number at a time.
• Likewise, traditional postal bulk-mail is not really broadcasting either; as we noted, the sender must send a separate copy of the letter, flyer, catalog, etc. to each recipient. This leads to the need to produce, distribute, and mail vast quantities of paper, each piece carrying the same information.

Somebody has to pay for the inefficiency

For something to be inefficient means simply that it costs more than it ought to. Someone has to pay this extra cost. When ethical advertisers use inefficient methods, they pay the full cost of this inefficiency themselves. Spammers, on the other hand, manage to pass these costs on to other people — the internet providers (and their customers) to whom the mail is directed. This point may not be immediately obvious, so keep reading.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with using a point-to-point medium to “broadcast” to many people; it all boils down to a simple business decision as to whether the advertiser can derive enough benefit from using such techniques in order to justify the cost (to him) of the inefficiency.

• For instance, a sender of postal bulk mail must pay postage (even if at a discounted bulk rate) for each item he sends; he also has to pay for the production, printing, and packaging of each of those items. 
• Likewise, telephone solicitors have to pay their telephone company for the calls they place, and they may also have to buy or lease special telephone equipment or lines to do the job. They may also have to hire sufficient boiler-room staff (or robots) to place all these calls, one at a time. 

In these cases, the marketer pays the full cost of the delivery of the messages, including the costs for the inefficiency of these duplicative messages. The recipient pays nothing, because the services used by the advertiser (i.e., the telephone company and the post office) have been set up to put the full cost burden on the sender. That is, it costs you nothing to receive postal bulk-mail, just as it costs you nothing (in most cases, anyway) to receive marketing calls on a landline telephone in your home. The same is not true for the internet, however.

Nowadays, most home internet users pay a simple flat rate for essentially unlimited access: that is, they pay the same $50 (or so) per month whether they download movies around the clock, or just send an e-mail or two. The internet providers compute these charges based on their costs of doing business, plus some profit margin. If the costs go up, then the fees will tend to have to go up as well.

Since spammers use inefficient bulk e-mail to distribute their messages, they spawn billions of kilobytes (literally) of highly-duplicative traffic that would not otherwise be seen. These billions of kilobytes have to be processed by the incoming mail hosts belonging to the recipients’ internet providers. This means that the providers need to use more internet bandwidth to receive this traffic, and must also provide additional (or more powerful) mail servers to absorb this traffic. They then must hire additional personnel (a significant cost in any business) to administer these expanded networks and systems.

It is well documented that anywhere from sixty to ninety percent of all e-mail traffic in the world these days is spam. This means that a very large share of the cost of a given internet provider’s e-mail budget goes to handling messages that nobody wants. Since spam continues to grow steadily in volume, the costs for receiving it also inevitably grow. The internet provider must either absorb or reduce these costs (perhaps by finding more efficient ways to deal with the flood), or else must pass them on to their customers in the form of higher fees.

So, here’s the upshot of all this: more spam sent means higher costs to the internet providers who must receive it, and ultimately higher costs to the recipients (you and me). We also see why bulk e-mail is so attractive to the spammer: he does not pay the cost for any but the smallest portion of the inefficiency associated with his operations; he has managed the neat trick of passing most of his advertising cost onto his customers.

What can be done?

Having described the problem of spammers’ cost-shifting in what I hope is an eloquent and succinct manner, I have now come to the end of the post, where I am expected to pass on a solution to the problem. Unfortunately, I do not have such a solution. The issue before us is more of a social (or economic) problem than a technical one, and like most such problems it is a tough nut to crack. 

If we could somehow re-engineer the financial structure of the internet in such a way as to make spammers pay in full for their activities (including the inefficiency of the traffic they generate), then spamming would quickly become a prohibitively expensive livelihood. Any such restructuring of how internet service is paid for (and accounted for), however, would require one very large magic wand. 

For example, a provider could simply begin charging for access to its incoming mail hosts for the delivery of mail to its customers; the sending service would be expected to pay these charges, and then somehow pass them back to the customers who sent the mail. This would (in theory) place the cost burden back on the senders, where it belongs. You can bet, however, that no ISP is going to step forward to be the first to impose such a requirement, since if it did so it would very quickly find itself virtually cut off from the rest of the internet (since other providers would be very unlikely to agree to pay such charges). Plus, such a scheme would obviously be opposed by legitimate bulk-mailers (who do not spam), since it would massively increase their costs. 

Even if we could magically impose such a regime across the entire internet, it would require the mother of all accounting systems, one that would be prone to error, unreliability, or inequity, and that would likely create many more problems than it solved. 

Finally, it is very likely that spammers wouln’t even be affected by such a scheme, since they generally steal services in order to send their mail (a topic I reserve for a future post), and so might not even appear on the accountants’ radar screens.

And so, regardless of whether we can solve it, the problem remains: spammers exploit the odd financial structure of the internet to get other people to pay for their crooked activities.