Spam Requires Multidimensional Solution

The low cost of e-mail has attracted a massive onslaught of advertising because of simple economics: it’s cheaper to broadcast a single e-mail message to 150 million random e-mail addresses purchased on an inexpensive CD-ROM than it is to identify a likely audience and send targeted e-mail to a few thousand of them. Although more traditional advertising methods, such as direct mail, are considered unsuccessful with response rates below 1%, e-mail advertising operates at such low cost to the sender than even success rates of .01%-100 customers out of 1 million e-mails-are viable.

Unwanted e-mail not only annoys end users but also creates extra costs for organizations. They must create systems for blocking data they didn’t want in the first place, find it hard to send legitimate communications (if fraudulent e-mails have been sent in their name in the past, as is the case with most banks), and can even be an avenue for criminal activity-for example, “phishing” scams in which a message appears to be a legitimate e-mail from a customer’s bank, or e-mail messages that guide users to a site where spyware or other malicious software is installed.