According to the paper, AOL Tech Support Engineer Jason Smathers sold about 93 million addresses of AOL customers to a spammer. For this crime he’ll get up to 5 years in prison, and pay up to $250,000.
But I was always told the punishment should fit the crime. I believe, like the school teachers of old, we should make Jason do the equivalent of writing on the blackboard “I will not sell email addresses to spammers.”
He should apologize to everyone who had their email sold. Individually and personally (Sorry, Buzz, no ActiveWords to help him out). If he were to type:
To: Customer@aol.com
Dear Customer,
I am sorry I sold your email to spammers. It will never happen again.
Sincerely,Jason Smathers
to each person, it would take him about 566 years of 24 hour days to do it. See calculation below. Perhaps that would deter some others who do similar things, as opposed to the current Can-SPAM legislation which is doing nothing.
So, Jason, get typing, because 566 years is a long time.
| Average email length | 10 |
| "@aol.com" | 8 |
| Dear 10CharName, | 16 |
| I apologize for selling your name | |
| to spammers. It will never happen again. | |
| Sincerely, | |
| Jason Smathers |
123 |
| Total number of words in the above | 157 |
| Assume typing 60 words per minute | 60 |
| Time to Type email | 2.62 |
| Time to open, address, tab and hit | |
| send to send the mail | 0.5 |
| Total aprox time to send email in minutes |
3.2 |
| Number of Minutes in an Hour | 60 |
| Number of emails per hour | 18.75 |
| Number of email addresses sold | 93,000,000.00 |
| Number of hours it would take to write apology |
4,960,000.00 |
| Translated to 24 hour days | 206,666.67 |
| In years | 566.21 |