There are many frustrating aspects of modern life and spam is most definitely one of them. Not the tinned meat variety of course, the unsolicited emails which are typically sent to a large number of users to hook in recipients with advertising, phishing and spreading malware. According to Statista, spam messages accounted for over 46.8% of email traffic in December 2023. While this is down from a high of over 70% back in 2014, the number of emails sent has increased year on year. In 2023 the average number of emails sent and received across the world topped 347 billion - per day. That's a lot of spam emails.
Most of us have software that filters spam into a junk folder. The mailboxes for Iteracy's websites have their own spam filter which marks or deletes email depending on their spaminess score. While these are mostly effective, it does require manual checking as genuine emails can still get marked as spam accidentally. Spam filtering software needs to be constantly updated in the arms race against spammers trying to trick their way into an inbox by appearing legitimate.
Early spam prevention included keyword searches and blacklists for the IP addresses of computers used to send spam emails. Spam has evolved to beat these systems by using images, alternate spellings, and the creation of botnets which are hacked computers or email addresses co-ordinated into a spam-sending army. The takedown of a single botnet called Rustock in 2011 led to a one-third reduction in email spam and a one-quarter reduction in global email traffic.
These days it's much easier to unsubscribe and turn off notifications from legitimate companies who take the laws around unsolicited emails much more seriously. Not spammers, though. Junk marketing has always existed in the form of flyers put through your letterbox and telemarketing phone calls, but these are much less prevalent than spam due to one factor: cost.
In a paper titled The Economics of Spam from 2012, the authors calculated that a spammer needs one conversion per 8.3 million messages sent to break even. The cost to us is the time it takes to wade through spam emails. From the same 2012 paper, the authors calculated that spam sent to people in the United States cost around $20 billion annually in lost time (for comparison, the profit earned by spammers was $200 million).
Is there an alternative? The number of messaging apps now extends well beyond emails to WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger and more. If all messages required a fee to be paid before being sent - the digital equivalent of sticking on a stamp - this would seriously change the economic appeal of sending spam.
Our friend in Valencia, Nicholas Piano, has set up a messaging start up based on this model called Tela. We invited him to share his vision for a world without spam, and asked him a few questions about how he would see it working.
What inspired you to set up Tela?
How does Tela work?
How much does it cost to send messages?
How do you pay?
Who do you expect to use Tela?
How do I sign up for Tela?