On December 1, 2008 at 01:34 johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com (John Levine) wrote:
No sender, legitimate or spammer, pays anything like the full cost of
handling their mail. It's all subsidized by recipients. As I've said
over and over, that's fine for the mail we want.
Well, perhaps that's fine as far as you are personally concerned, but
for those of us who have to come up with the resources and management
it's not so fine.
Are you really saying that the cost of running your mail infrastructure
FOR THE MAIL YOUR USERS WANT is burdensome? I've never heard another
ISP say that. It's the other 98% of the mail that they don't want
that's the problem.
Since I question the whole idea of "mail your users want" in general,
in this conversation that seems to include for example the once a day
or more mailings from amazon, it's hard to make a definitive
statement, it's an ill-defined concept to me.
Sure we can start with email from friends and colleagues but I thought
I was clear that I was drawing the line at any bulk emailers and
saying I would treat them all about the same (plus or minus non-profit
etc), they should pay the freight.
Anyhow, it's not a well posed question is it? What's "burdensome"?
I just think spam is a degenerate case of a larger problem of
unlimited free email sending.
It's interesting that nobody (unless you own your infrastructure) gets
unlimited free email receiving. Inboxes hit quotas and that's that, no
more email.
Clearly there are burdens which have already been tackled by applying
limitations, charging for usage, etc.
But somehow unlimited free sending of email has become a sacred cow of
sorts. It's not the only one. But it is definitely one.
--
-Barry Shein
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