A popular refrain among people who like to pretend that what they do isn't spam is "This isn't spam, because I'm only sending it one time." This piece of flawed thinking may have helped shape the CAN-SPAM Act, which some critics say allows marketers "one free shot" at every mailbox (or more than one, because if the victim doesn't jump through the required hoops to 'opt out' of a particular spam campaign, the marketer gets to go on spamming them). The common fallacy in each case is that 'just one little spam' (like Mr Creosote's one 'wafer-thin mint') can't possibly hurt anyone.
A spam that I received today illustrates what it would be like to live in a world where everyone gets to send 'just one spam'. A gentleman in Mexico City is selling his Saab Turbo. Naturally, in this day and age, putting up flyers or taking out a small ad isn't good enough. So he downloads a piece of spamware and a mailing list containing email addresses that someone has assured him are somehow connected with Mexico (my address appears on a website that has some of my holiday pictures from Mexico), and fires off his ad to a million strangers.
I don't live in Mexico City. I don't live anywhere near Mexico City. Which is lucky for Mr I'm Selling My Saab, because if I did I would be strongly tempted to go round to his house and key his car for him. In fact, I might not stop there, and then he'd have to send out another message revising the condition of the car ("... EXCELENTES CONDICIONES. Nunca chocado, siempre muy limpio y cuidado ...") and mentioning that all four tires have been slashed, the windscreen shattered, and the interior filled up with something that can't quite be identified but that smells really, really bad.
Just kidding.
To get back to the point, Mr Saab's message ends up with the words:
Espero que no te haya molestado recibir este email, igual solo lo voy a mandar 1 ves.
which is to say "I hope getting this email didn't upset you, but I'm only going to send it once." Of course, Mr Saab seems to be aware of just how unwelcome unsolicited email can be: he's been careful not to put his real address on his message, limiting responses to the phone number he gives in the message.
Is sending a message 'just one time' acceptable? Not if every idiot who's selling something thinks he's entitled to mail a million strangers on the off-chance that one of them might bite. Or if small businesses start getting the idea that "it's OK so long as we don't send more than one message a month ... a week ... a day ... and if they don't like it, they'll tell us and we'll take them off our list." Because just once each from a million Saab-sellers or small businesses is still a million unwanted messages too many.
Relatively little spam is of this kind. Most spam, of course, is sent in industrial quantity by crooks — stock spammers, snake-oil and stolen software salesmen and other kinds of conmen — rounded out by a few big companies who think the rules don't apply to them. But mixed with that is a steady trickle of Chinese manufacturers, crackpots and that pizza restaurant in Lima, Peru that thinks I need to know what's on special this week.
What I dread is a world where spam is seen as acceptable; where idiots like Saab Man really think it is OK to send spam because after all it's 'one time only'. If we want to be able to use email ever again, we need to educate these people that it's not OK, that it is intrusive, unwelcome and unnecessary. And if we can't get the message across any other way, well, maybe we will have to investigate the educational value of keying the fuckers' cars after all.