How to Make Money From Spam (Legally and Ethically!)

Published: 01/02/2002
By: Cameron Barrett

I've been emailing back and forth with some of the authors of various anti-spam resources. To date, almost all truly effective solutions are some kind of server-side program that needs to be installed by a system administrator. One example is Justin Mason's SpamAssassin, which is written as a Perl module and requires admin permissions on your mail server to install (unless you are capable of installing Perl modules in your usr dir; this usually varies between system configurations). Another example is using procmail recipes, which requires you to figure out the somewhat arcane configuration syntax of procmail (as well as have it installed on your mail server). For most people, these solutions aren't feasible or are too complex for them to figure out on their own. What I'd really like to see is some kind of Perl (or other) CGI that can be installed in a standard cgi-bin dir that you can use to filter your mail before it gets to your inbox.

In fact, this might be a decent money-making opportunity for someone. Set up a rack of servers somewhere that do nothing but receive redirected email, filter it through a real-time spam filter (like SpamCop's), and then return it back to a specified email address -- spam-free. You could charge something like $10 a year for 50,000 emails. Sign up a couple thousand users, and you might turn a profit fairly quickly doing nothing but filtering people's email for them and giving them a spam-free Internet experience. You'd be a hero.

There are some challenges to overcome, most of them having to do with how you route and redirect email through such a service, but I think that people are getting to be so disgusted with spam that they'll do just about anything for an email address they can use freely without worrying about getting overloaded with spam.

This is a pipe-dream idea, but very feasible. I would settle for a standard Perl CGI that can filter my email. Anyone know of something like this?

Feedback welcomed.