Email charges or email hoax?

[magenta321]

Received from Duke U.

Guess the warnings were true. Federal Bill 602P 5-cents per E-mail sent. It
figures! No more free E-mail! We knew this was coming!! Bill 602P will
permit the Federal Government to charge a 5-cent charge on every delivered
E-mail. Please read the following carefully if you intend to
stay online and continue using E-mail.

The last few months have revealed an alarming trend in the Government of
the United States attempting to quietly push through legislation that will
affect our use of the Internet. Under proposed legislation, the US Postal
Service will be attempting to bill E-mail users out of "alternative
postage fees". Bill 602P will permit the Federal Government to charge a
5-cent surcharge on every e-mail delivered, by billing Internet Service
Providers at source. The consumer would then be billed in turn by the ISP.
Washington DC lawyer Richard Stepp is working without pay to prevent this
legislation from becoming law. The US Postal Service is claiming lost
revenue, due to the proliferation of E-mail, is costing nearly $230,000,000
in revenue per year. You may have noticed their recent ad campaign: "There
is nothing like a letter." Since the average person received about 10
pieces of E-mail per day in 1998, the cost of the typical individual would
be an additional 50 cents a day - or over $180 per year - above and beyond
their regular Internet costs. Note that this would be money paid directly
to the US Postal Service for a service they do not even provide. The whole
point of the Internet is democracy and non-interference.

You are already paying an exorbitant price for snail mail because of
bureaucratic ! inefficiency. It currently takes up to 6 days for a letter
to be delivered from coast to coast. If the US Postal Service is allowed to
tinker with E-mail, it will mark the end of the "free" Internet in the
United States. Congressional representative, Tony Schnell (R) has even
suggested a "$20-$40 per month surcharge on all Internet service" above and
beyond the governments proposed E-mail charges. Note that most of the major
newspapers have ignored the story the only exception being the
Washingtonian which called the idea of E-mail surcharge "a useful concept
who's time has come" (March 6th, 1999 Editorial). Do not sit by and watch
your freedom erode away!

Send this E-mail to EVERYONE on your list, and tell all your friends and
relatives to write their congressional representative and say "NO" to Bill
602P. It will only take a few moments of your time and could very well be
instrumental in killing a bill we do not want.

PLEASE FORWARD!
************************************************

Ok, I recieved this in an email, and it is probably another urban legend, but that is not really why I am posting this.

I began thinking about my email habits. I would personally hate to pay a fee for sending email (and five cents sounds like a lot when you figure that I send roughly 20 a day which equals a dollar, or $30 in a month! Ack!) However, I absoultely love the idea that businesses would have to pay too... that means less junk mail! Think about it, they are sending free mail to everyone and their mother whose email addy they can get ahold of. It doesn't matter that you are not interested in things like "barely legal teens and their farm pets", you get these messages because it doesn't cost them anything to send them to you.

Now, unless they had reason to target you as being into barely legal teens with farm animals, you wouldn't get the email. This would be a great reduction of the amount of spam we get each day. It's not just the pornsites sending it out, and those of you with AOL accounts are surely swamped (I can't tell you how much junk mail I got a day from AOL just because my user name was in the dictionary, so magenta1@aol.com, magenta2....and myself all got the same spam.

I think I am onto something. Tax businesses for sending emails. Yay. What do ya'll think?

[magenta321]

Here's the link that shows the email above is a hoax...
http://www.europe.f-secure.com/hoaxes/bill602p.shtml

I figured someone would get nervous, or someone would have to prove it was an urban legend.

Anyway, what do you think of my proposition of actually putting this into effect for businesses?

[foxfroggy]

Rather than making everyone pay, i'd like to see some kind of fine for spammers.

About five times a week I get offers to have my penis enlarged, along with the nude teens and risque barnyard stuff. The there's those foreign "dignitaries" who want me to stash a few million for them, the investment "opportunities" and the lottos.

That particular hoax has been around for years. All bills are designated "House Bill #xxx"or "Senate Bill #xxx" (and an occaionalJoint Bill) so there's no such thing as a P bill.

A goodplace to check out these things is www.snopes.com

Pat

[conradd]

I like it, but what I'd like even more is for businesses to pay me for opening their e-mail. Every time I open a spam letter, .05 would be deposited into my paypal account. Why should it all go to Uncle Sam?

Deb

[KateTPZ]

I like the fine for SPAM - or businesses paying me to open their junk mail! But charge business for sending email? No thanks - everything I buy - product or service - is already expensive enough. If a business pays more for something it simply means that its customers will pay more.

[erik_kosberg]

As much as I hate spam, I doubt that much could be done from a legal point of view. Even if it were to be criminalized and the law somehow survived challenges on Constitutional grounds (highly unlikely), spammers would just send their mail from servers in Uzbekistan, Moldova, Japan or any of 200 other countries not bound by U.S. law.

[pluckyduck]

Hey!

Answer a question for me....(I don't know if I should start a new thread or not, I guess we'll see what happens)....

Why is Spam so much worse than junk US mail?

I hate, revile and loathe Spam. The only thing I hate worse than Spam is telemarketers!

Junk mail doesn't bother me. I just sort it, at home and work, standing right over a trash can. I throw a lot of it out, but, I like some of the stuff, and will respond to an offer that appeals to me. I'm not allowed to look at the Lillian vernon catalog for another few years. I tend to blow my yearly budget in one shot on stuff that seems like a good idea at the time.

Now, full disclosure, I'm a direct marketer who communicates with businesses by mail....so, um, I guess I'm a little prejuidced. (Hey, if I didn't mail you Ms. Businessperson a catalog, you'd never know that I exist, and I'm wonderful to do business with, I promise! )

I'd sooner sacrifice my Poodle to the Cat Gods than ever spam someone though...it's just the lowest of the low.

Why???? Why is it a mortal sin? I know it is, but I'm at a loss to explain to other people at work, for instance, why it's okay to send people catalogs but it is not okay to use email marketing unless we are damn sure that people really want the email message. People who don't frequent the net don't get it.

Now, what's "it"?

Andrea

[erik_kosberg]

Why is Spam so much worse than junk US mail?

The senders of junk snail mail have to pay quite a bit for sending out each piece. How much does it cost the sender to print and mail one million pieces of junk mail? Quite a bit — the marginal costs of each additional address are relatively high. How much does it cost the sender to send out a million e-mails? Not much, and the marginal costs of each additional address are relatively small. How much does it cost me (directly, not indirectly as a potential customer of a particular company) to get 100 pieces of junk mail? A few moments of my time to take it out of my mailbox and place it in my recycling bin. How much does it cost me directly to get 100 pieces of spam? A fair amount of my precious time (time is money) as I wait for it to move from my ISP’s server to my hard drive and a fair chunk of change if I pay by the hour to access my mail over a 56K modem.

[cristina1]

How much does it cost me directly to get 100 pieces of spam? A fair amount of my precious time (time is money) as I wait for it to move from my ISP’s server to my hard drive and a fair chunk of change if I pay by the hour to access my mail over a 56K modem.

Not to mention the time it takes to delete 100 pieces of SPAM. It's a lot easier to sort out snail mail than junk mail. Try finding the one email you DO want in even 25 pieces of SPAM. At least when I go to my snail mail box, it only takes seconds to separate the junk from what I really want to see - letters, bills, etc.

And SPAM can be faked to look like something important a lot easier than junk mail - for the main reason that everything in your inbox looks pretty much the same. All you see in an inbox in sender's name and subject line.

Not to mention the biggest thing - I have yet to find porn come into my snail mail box. Yet, for some reason, everyone thinks I am interested in seeing hot young teen lesbians on my free email accounts.

[pluckyduck]

Well, there you go....thanks for answering that question for me so quickly. all you had to do was put out money as the gatekeeper and it all became crystal clear.

If a direct marketer sends you a piece of mail that you aren't interested in, someone isn't doing their job properly. Now of course, this happens all the time, direct marketing being not nearly the exact science it is touted to be...but I can promise that a direct marketer's dream is to only ever send out exactly as many mail pieces as is necessary and no more.

As far as costs go they are high and getting higher all the time because the Post Office can't get its head out of its butt and run the organization properly. Between printing and mailing and lists and postage, my catalog (as opposed to smaller print pieces) costs over $1.00 for each unit I send. You best believe that I want to send as few as possible.

Theorectically, the Internet was supposed to make all of those costs go away. Just two years ago, the Direct Marketing world was abuzz with the "free" possibilities of the web. I think one of the reasons that all those internet companies gave everything away free to get "eyeballs" was because ththey thought that the free was going to work both ways. They thought they were going to be able to send you (or sell your name so someone else could send you) email messages at virtually no cost.

Thank God the Anti-Spam people (and you and me) have been so aggressive in shutting it down. You may not think, looking at your inbox, that it has been shut down, but trust me, it has. The only spam you get is from the lowest of the low...and the rest of corporate America was dying to spam you. You would have been getting dozens and dozens of email solicitations from Kmart and Proctor and Gamble and McDonalds and everybody else, every single day, if people didn't fight back.

The downside for me, personally, is that its made it hard for me to set up email marketing in a way that would be most effective. We've got tons of email addresses from customers that have been collected during transactions (proof approvals, communications where they started the inquiry, etc.). These are customers who use us and like us, and would probably be happy to hear about "what's on sale" occasionally...but I refuse to pick them up when the email address is given to a rep over the phone. (The sales manager thinks I'm crazy, but he's not an internet person, so he doesn't understand. If a single person objects, then we are Spammers. )

What's my point? My point is that the stigma of being a Spammer is the only weapon the regular folk have to keep email marketers at bay. Pity the poor folk who are trying to peddle their email lists...it's really funny. I just imagine the business plan they drew up two years ago, and the projections made from the interest in the marketing community in using email. They keep advertising in industry publications, but I don't know anyone who would touch their lists with a ten foot pole.

Andrea
who doesn't like Spam, the meat product or the email kind

[frazzledspice]

In the junk e-mail I've received I've gotten some offers to pay me for receiving e-mail (if it is triggered through particular websites.) So, Deb, there might be a few places out there that would give you 1/2 cent for reading.

When I get my e-mail open, I hit "check all." Then I look through the titles, uncheck the ones I want to read, and hit "delete."

It's not that much trouble. But Bulk Mail is alot more inefficient than I'd like (and sometimes writeoff notices, etc. go to my bulk mail account.)