Using uncensored communication channels to divert spam traffic

Abstract

We offer a microeconomic model of the two-sided market for the dominant form of spam: bulk, unsolicited, and commercial advertising email. We adopt an incentive-centered design approach to develop a simple, feasible improvement to the current email system using an uncensored communication channel. Such a channel could be an email folder or account, to which properly tagged commercial solicitations are routed. We characterize the circumstances under which spammers would voluntarily move much of their spam into the open channel, leaving the traditional email channel dominated by person-to-person, non-spam mail. Our method follows from observing that there is a real demand for unsolicited commercial email, so that everyone can be made better off if a channel is provided for spammers to meet spamdemanders. As a bonus, the absence of filtering in an open channel restores to advertisers the incentive to make messages truthful, rather than to disguise them to avoid filters. We show that under certain conditions all email recipients are better off when an open channel is introduced. Only recipients wanting spam will use the open channel enjoying the less disguised messages, and

Incentive-Centered Design for User-Contributed Content

“…Given a greater likelihood that a recipient will claim a spammer's bond, and appropriately selecting the size of the bond, the cost for a good sender to signal its belief that the recipient wants to see its mail will be sufficiently lower that they will be willing to comply and send email, whereas bad senders will be discouraged. Chiao and MacKie-Mason [2006] addressed the email spam pollution problem from a somewhat different perspective. They show conditions under which offering an alternative, even lower-cost (and higher-quality) platform for advertisers to distribute their spam might induce enough diversion of advertising to the alternative channel, simultaneously lowering the value of the regular email channel for other spammers, so that in equilibrium most or all spam will move to the advertising ("open") channel.…”