Toward a sustainable email marketing infrastructure

Email marketing is a legitimate, lucrative, and widely used business tool that is in danger of being overrun by unwanted commercial email (also known as spam). Conventional approaches to maintaining the robustness of legitimate email attack pieces of the problem. In contrast, this article asserts that the email marketing infrastructure is a complex system requiring holistic analysis. In order to understand the underlying dynamics of the spam industry and to examine alternative mitigation strategies, the article develops a system dynamics model. The modeling process reveals that the system conforms to the limits-to-growth generic structure. Simulations suggest that filtering may have the unintended consequence of increasing the global amount of spam. The unexpected increase comes about because better filters can actually assist spammers by abating an information deficit.