Why I Don't Agree With Seth

Seth Godin comes out in favor of "email stamps" on his weblog.

Longtime readers know that I am a huge fan and friend of Seth's. 

His blog is the last (meaning first) on my blogroll and was the first blog I read religiously.

My first email investment ever was in his company Yoyodyne which basically invented the concept of permission email.

So it is not without a lot of pause that I would disagree with Seth on an email related topic.

But Seth's arguments around stamps are all related to "acquistion" or "direct marketing" email.

I don't want to get any of that kind of email anyway.  I'd be happy for all of it to end up in my junk folder.

The area where I am concerned is around what the industry called "transactional email" or "retention email".

These are my eBay outbid notices, my Feedblitz emails, my TicketWeb emails alerting me to the new concerts coming to town, my bank statements, etc.

There are the emails with utility to ME.  Adding to the cost of the email system will reduce the number of high value emails that can be justified by web services.  And the user loses.

So if you could simply say "spammers must use stamps" and everyone else gets to get in for free, I'd be a fan of stamps too.  Reputation may be a way to do that, but none of the reputation systems have been around long enough to know yet.

So let's make sure reputation services like Return Path's Sender Score get some airtime in this debate and let's applaud AOL's decision to keep the reputation-driven enhanced whitelist.

Unfortunately, there isn't one single magic bullet in the attempt to lick spam.

Comments

[steve]

i have to agree with seth -- and add that we're not really arguing about *if* there should be a cost for email, but rather only about how much and who collects.

there is already a fee for sending email, albeit a miniscule one. unless you get online at a USA public library, internet access is not free, not for the email recipient, and certainly not for the email sender.

the infinitesmally small cost of access and email has lulled us all into a false sense of entitlement. seth isn't arguing for a new tariff,; he's only arguing for a rate increase -- one i think long overdue. we all -- and we americans in particular -- have convinced ourselves that certain public utilities we love are "free" -- witness our violent opposition to tolls on freeways and subsidies for amtrak and upgrades to federal air traffic control systems -- but they are not free, and its time we paid our share, and (gasp!) maybe even allowed utility access to be a revenue generator for our poor long suffering government -- which, after all, created the public utilities in the first place. our government is painfully in deficit red ink; why not create an electronic equivelent of the US postal service? letting yahoo or AOL or even Return Path collect fees for email traffic is simply not fair, an eyepopping de facto public subsidy of the private sector -- for unlike with FedEx or UPS, or bottled water, there's no public utility alternative.

And to make the whole thing palatable, let's use the proceeds for geeky worthwhile causes, say, alterantive energy sources -- after all, all our PCs and internet gear and iPods and cel phones do consume an awful of energy...

[Nicholas]

Without taking a position on the stamps issue -- isn't this where RSS comes in?

All of the transactional/alert stuff you're talking about can be delivered as personalized RSS feeds -- no email required.

But it's still pretty hard to spam the newsreader (or the Google personalized homepage).

[druce]

It's always seemed to me the only people who thought email should cost cash were either the people who hoped to get paid, or misguided free-market fetishists.

In order to charge people, you have to identify them. But once you can identify them, there's no need to charge them. You just cut off the people who violate the rules. A Sender Policy Framework - type system widely adopted would really end the worst forms of forged header, spambot-generated bulk spam.

Money is just a form of information. Whatever system you come up with using cash, you can create the exact same system using some form of 'reputation points' that have to be spent, and any mail recipient could determine their own threshold for cutting people off. Which would still be a free market solution. There is no advantage to cash, except perhaps reusing the existing payments and legal infrastructure, and of course generating a revenue model for someone. And the disadvantage is that anyone who has cash and a workable revenue model for sending annoying unsolicited emails can keep sending them, or you have to make everyone pay a high enough price to break that revenue model.

[Dan Primack]

Seth's arguments around stamps are all related to "acquistion" or "direct marketing" email. I don't want to get any of that kind of email anyway. I'd be happy for all of it to end up in my junk folder.
A big problem is that "direct marketing" email also includes opt-in publications like mine, at least as far as aol, yahoo, et all are concerned. If we begin having to pay extra to send out emails (and we already pay plenty), the fees likely will be passed on to consumers/readers. The result: Less free content.

[Shawn Struck]

Email being basically free isn't a bug. It's a feature that has driven the digital revolution. It allows groups to scale up from a dozen friends to a hundred people who love knitting to half-a-million concerned citizens without a major bankroll.

Email readers and senders will both lose, because the incentives for Yahoo, AOL, and Goodmail are all wrong. Their service is only valuable if it "saves" you from their spam filters. In turn, they have an incentive to treat more of your email as spam, and thereby "encouraging" people to sign up.

Even email senders who just want to reach Dad@aol.com may eventually be in trouble. Once a pay-to-speak system like this gets going, it will be increasing difficult for people who don't pay to get their mail through. The system has no way to distinguish between ordinary mail and bulk mail, spam and non-spam, personal and commercial mail. It just gives preference to people who pay.

[Jerry Shereshewsky]

I have been an advocate for some kind of stamp for about 5 years now. As a member of the Board of Directors of the DMA I clearly saw eMail move from a killer app to a suicide app.

I had wished that the stamp would be issued by the USPS rather than individual ISP's. The USPS has, on the statue books, laws against forgery and an enforcement mechanism. I fear that the technological sophistication of the criminal spammers will constantly create work-arounds at the ISP level.

Seth is absolutely right; without some kind of friction spam will only get worse. And from the perspective of a direct marketer money is the most efficient friction there is. If it pays to mail they will and if it doesn't they won't.

We have been living in a fool's paradise of 'free' for way too long. There are always costs and ways to hide, bury or otherwise obfuscate them. When I send an invitation to an event to 1500 of my closest and most intimate friends for free I have gotten a gift from someone. Were they to cost a fraction of a cent (or more) I would still send them. It's still a whole lot cheaper and easier than snail mail.

[Kevin Quaderer]

If ISP's respond to these new "email stamps" by filtering out everyone who can't or won't pay for them, their spam filtering product will score false positives left and right, and be useless. Users will ultimately determine the level of spam filtering they desire, and express that preference as demand for a product.

If your eBay outbid notices, Feedblitz emails, and bank statements get through just fine right now, and you like it that way, it would be a bad idea for your ISP to change the status quo. The only difference now would be that the emails you opted to receive from Apple.com would always hit your inbox, instead of occasionally landing in with the junk.