Should we level the playing field for small business spammers?

Nobody likes email SPAM except spammers hoping to convert .01% into sales. Unfortunately, the cost of sending an email is very low and therefore any ratio is decent, even in some cases .001% and that’s the problem. Okay, let’s talk, shall we?

Much of the senseless SPAM we receive comes from smaller operators who do not have the convenience of artificial intelligent software or high probability algorithms. How do we know that this is a fact? Simple, if you are a woman and you receive Viagra or Anti-Baldness SPAM or if you are a man and your breasts enlarge or Sports Bra SPAM. These smaller companies use scrapers and buy old email lists regardless of your buying habits. Larger companies use targeted SPAM, which often doesn’t seem like SPAM to us because we’re really interested.

What if the smaller companies that sent SPAM had better access to specific algorithms to help them find the best customers? They would then use that software and we would remove a good chunk of all the SPAM and thus save bandwidth for everyone and remove most of our junk mailboxes.

After all, if your sales emails are tailored to your needs, wants, and purchasing options, it suddenly doesn’t look like SPAM anymore, right? Now, a business that’s only getting 0.001% conversion rates from a massive email campaign probably doesn’t have enough money to use Big Data or have a sophisticated computer nerd write the ultimate spam algorithm.

So what if someone licenses these tools to the smallest of home-based businesses, and if they abuse them, they can’t use them anymore? You see, we need a real-world solution and we need to rethink the problem, because we still have a challenge with spam and although there are laws to the contrary, enforcing those laws is next to impossible. Bill Gates had long ago suggested that “micro-payments” for sent emails would solve the problem, because even if the cost per email sent was low, operators couldn’t afford to send SPAM randomly – they had to. Be selective.

Being selective means having a decent email list and double checking it, updating it and making sure everything sent is well targeted, otherwise you would be ruined trying to send bulk emails. My solution above also has a free market cost benefit theme. Perhaps it is a good business model for Big Data to capture new small business customers en masse, and if so, that could eliminate 50% of SPAM. Think about this.

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