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by Bruce Miller Updated January 20, 2002 The Direct Marketing Association has an official policy that UCE is just fine. On January 10, 2002, I got an email from Christina Duffney, Director, Media Relations and Corporate Communications, that said: The DMA requires all members to provide an opt out for consumers. The DMA believes consumers should have the right to opt out of any marketing solicitation. It is a requirement of our membership that all members have a privacy policy and allow consumers to opt out.Let's take a serious look at this position. The DMA has about 1,600 members. Let's say you really want to opt-out from each of the 1,600 members' first UCE that you receive. How long will it take to to do this? Most likely it would take about 22 seconds minimum to click on a link and go to a web page. So, let's take 22 seconds as the average. At 1,600 first-time messages, you would be spending 35,200 seconds or 586 minutes or 9.7 hours opting out. And make no mistake about it. If the DMA gets opt-out condoned through laws that officially allow it, thousands of other non-DMA companies will follow. According to the World Book Encyclopedia, 2001 Edition, Volume B, page 724, there are 15,000,000 single proprietorship business, 1,500,000 partnerships, and 4,000,000 corporations in the United States. Add them all together and you get 20,500,000 businesses. If each of these businesses sent you one email and you wanted to opt out of future emails for each of these businesses, the 22 seconds to opt out suddenly becomes quite a time-consuming affair: 451,000,000 seconds, or 7,516,666 minutes, or 125,278 hours, or 5,220 days, or 14.3 years opting out. You'll be spending all your time opting out instead of reading your personal email. Now, let's consider the size of each UCE. Here are the sizes in kilobytes of my last 20 UCE's at the time I began writing this page:
11.90, 3.90, 3.60, 6.80, 11.00, 11.00, 4.80, 1.60, 18.00, 2.20, 4.50, 3.20, 2.00, 5.00, 3.20, 2.90, 12.00, 2.80, 18.00, 3.80.The typical amount of storage space an ISP provides for the storage of email on its server is 2 or 3 megabytes. Let's use 2 megabytes, or 2,000,000 bytes, which is the amount offered on Hotmail and because Hotmail is a very popular email service. Using the average UCE size of 6,565 bytes, simple math shows this: 2,000,000/6,565 = 304.6 messages. Let's round to 307 messages. It will only take 307 messages to fill up your email account. When it is filled up with UCE, all other email -- wanted or not wanted -- will be rejected. Assuming you are not using Hotmail, which is a free service (unless you buy extra storage space), but rather paying an ISP for Internet connection and email services, you are paying -- renting -- a specified amount of storage space on your ISP for your email. The DMA would leave you to believe by their opt-out policy that it is just find and dandy for companies to store their advertising in your rental space without your permission. The bottom line is that the DMA wants to make the theft of your time and your rental space legal. If you don't agree with this, start writing your congressional representatives that the DMA's opt-out solution for UCE is not acceptable. |