Bedeviled by Spam

Every e-mail that Net Global Marketing sends out is spam (“Lost in the Cyber-Kudzu,” by Matthew Heller, Dec. 21). The argument that those advertisements are sent only to those who have “opted in” is ridiculous. When purchasing items online, I’ve never agreed to receive other “offers” from any company, yet I continue to be bombarded with advertisements from every company that I may have purchased from. Most online shoppers probably don’t notice a small box that a retailer has preset to “yes” to send future ads. The only good thing about the e-mails is that you can delete all of them with a single click without ever reading them. Hopefully the federal government’s “do-not-call” list will someday include these marketers, or maybe retailers eventually will realize that nobody is reading their ads. In the meantime, thank God for the delete button!

Craig Johnson

Venice

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The whole concept of opt-in spam is a big lie. Click a button on a Web page, and you may have opted in to thousands of pieces of spam from now until the end of time. Here is a challenge I would put to “legitimate” Internet marketers: Write to 10,000 on your opt-in list and ask how many think they actually opted in to something. I’ll bet the “yes” response would be less than 1%, proving the lie.

Donald Steinmann

Via the Internet

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There is a solution to spam: shift the cost from the recipient to the sender by charging the sender per e-mail, perhaps just one cent per message, and update e-mail protocol to include traceability to the sender. Neither are easy to implement, from either a technical or cultural standpoint, but unless we do, and soon, e-mail will become obsolete, killed by greed and stupidity.

Jim Hayes

Fallbrook