Hold on there. Your figures assume that every marketer will have every address in the world.

Let's examine that.

Just for a moment, let's change the scenario from one percent of all businesses sending UCE to ten percent (not unreasonable), while we attribute to each business a randomly-chosen ten percent of all addresses (unreasonably low). The count remains at 7,786 e-mails per address per day.

Now let's backtrack to only one percent of all businesses sending UCE (unreasonably low), still giving each business a minuscule ten percent of all addresses (unreasonably low). That makes the count 778 e-mails per address per day, still a prodigious amount of unwanted advertising.

But only ten percent of e-mail users will get them.

Wrong! Hundreds of companies will be selling their own proprietary address lists, each of which will be compiled through different means using different sources. It's pretty unlikely that any e-mail address will escape every single one of those lists; it's likely that most e-mail addresses will end up on more than half of those lists. It's also likely that serious sellers will use multiple lists.

What makes ten percent of all addresses an "unreasonably low" estimate?

Considering the ways in which marketers get addresses -- from incoming correspondence, contests, giveaways, buying and/or renting lists, e-pending, spidering WWW sites -- it's not unreasonable to believe that a reasonably active company could amass an enormous collection of working e-mail addresses in a short time. Available figures suggest a good working number of 150 million Internet users in the USA; if a spammer can routinely collect hundreds of thousands of addresses in a few hours, certainly a determined professional marketing force can do better than fifteen million over a period of months.

Consider the list companies that exist now, the ones that make a lot of money creating and managing address lists. The only way they make money is through their ability to find people. They're good at it. Can you imagine such a company being competitive with only ten percent of all active addresses? Most any of them could give you a million addresses if you requested a list of 23-year-old Croatian men interested in buying orange socks.

Today, ordinary spammers -- people unlikely to have marketing degrees, or even enough qualifications to get a mailroom job at your company -- are collecting, and mailing to, addresses that were newly created literally minutes before they reach those addresses. To think that unskilled yahoos selling penis pills could consistently outperform professional firms with years of experience gathering addresses is just silly. Mailing-list brokers will have no shortage of addresses for willing senders, and no address will exist long before finding its way onto several lists.

Also, bear in mind that most people today have multiple addresses. Given the scenario in which businesses each have a randomly-acquired percentage of all addresses, a person will have one of his addresses on some of these lists while another of his addresses will appear on other of these lists. And so on. There will be significant overlap. The more addresses a person has, the more likely he is to appear at least once on each of many lists.

What makes you think that significantly more than one percent of businesses will be interested in sending UCE?

Remember all those boiler makers, ship builders, and like businesses we didn't think would be advertising via e-mail? Think again. Business regularly spends billions of dollars on advertising targeted at infinitesimal numbers of influential people. When was the last time you, or anyone you know, wrote a check to Archer Daniels Midland? They spend huge sums on television advertising; you've seen their ads if you watch TV at all. What have you bought from Cargill? (Who is Cargill?) They're spending millions now advertising themselves. Utility companies that have absolutely no competition in their service regions regularly spend millions of dollars to advertise to people who have no choice but to use their products.

If a company like ADM is willing to spend millions advertising to people who they know don't use their product, isn't it logical that they would be willing to spend hundreds to do that? If your local electric monopoly spends millions advertising to a captive audience who buy their product or go without, will they spend hundreds to do so? When a company can reach twenty million people for under one hundred dollars, there is absolutely nothing discouraging that company from advertising its train coach wheels or hundred-ton plastic molding presses via e-mail to every address it can muster. Mailing to twenty million people is bound to get them at least one contact with one potential purchaser... for a hundred dollars, cheap by any standard.

Try to name one hundred companies that would not want to reach twenty million prospects for a hundred dollars. If you can name a significant fraction of the 23,700,000 businesses¹ in the USA, you have the beginning of a counter-argument.

So what are you saying?

Postulate one mailing-list broker with ninety percent of all addresses, and two percent of companies able to afford to use their lists. Ninety percent of all addresses can expect to average 15,572 e-mails per day from them. Give each user just two addresses and the percentage goes from 90% to 94.87% of users, and the number for anyone on both lists goes to 31,144 per person per day.

What's reasonable to expect is that well over fifty percent of all businesses will attempt to reach every address they can afford to find, buy, rent or request, no less than twice per week. Most of these businesses will be armed with no less than thirty percent of all working e-mail addresses; some with up to seventy percent.

In light of that, it's quite conservative to deal with the numbers that result from only one percent of businesses mailing only once per month.

Note 1:   "In 2003, there were approximately 23.7 million businesses in the United States, according to Office of Advocacy estimates." Office of Advocacy, U.S. Small Business Administration, Small Business Frequently Asked Questions.