Tue - September 16, 2003

For $5, the company will add your email address to a list of opt-outs spammers can use to scrub their own lists. This approach will work, Global Removal says, because it pays the spammers who sign up for Global Removal's service not to spam member consumers.

Global Removal's approach has advantages over the Direct Marketing Association's email opt-out list which consumers and spammers must pay to use (why in the world would any spammer pay?) But if sending spammers protection money really gets your goat, consider this: It may not even work.

1. Global Removal certainly won't be the only SPAM removal list. Your email address may be on dozens of spammers' lists—which means that those spammers could get paid multiple times by multiple services to remove the same name.

2. Being paid not to spam has a predictable rate of return and therefore might become more profitable than spamming itself. But that doesn't mean you won't get more SPAM. On the contrary, spammers will harvest even more names and SPAM them even more heavily to drive consumers to pay the opt-out services. If the spammer profits from the SPAM itself, that would be icing on the cake.

3. Perhaps most importantly, a one-time payment won't cure all your ills. Global Removal's services only reach the limited number of spammers who have signed agreements to use its services.

You have to give Global Removal credit for chutzpah and creativity. But a service that paid spammers to grow wheat instead—that would really change the world.