Joshua asked:
Why the hell does everyone have to go up in arms everytime someone sends
a spam?
The simplest reason is that it is rude. It costs some people money
to get email on some commercial services. This is fundamentally
different than junk snail mail for this reason and too much spam can
prevent people from getting mail (mailboxes can fill up). So it is both
an intrusion into my life _and_ it can coneivably end in me either
loosing money or loosing mail (which is far more important). It is a
burden on the receiver _far_ beyond just hitting the delete key.
Spams are harmless! Spams even sometime are interesting and/or
useful!
every time there is a spam to a large number of the lists, a
tremendous volume of mail flows.
people who are able to monitor the incoming machines of one of the
larger online services (like me) can see a sizeable increase in system
load average and volume directly resulting from spams. this competition
for fixed resources inevitably translates to reduced service for
"first class" mail.
It is impossible to engineer a mail system that can cope with an
unlimited amount of abuse. this is in addition to the difficulties of
doing so on a fixed price economic model, and the difficulties of
keeping up with the successful rapid expansion of the population to
be served.
even if you, an individual, aren't charged anything per piece of mail,
there are costs borne by your service provider per piece of mail, and
these are *somehow* passed on to you. (They've calculated an average
across their entire user population to come up with a "monthly cost of
Internet mail".)
spamsters and bulk mailers are not at all concerned about efficiency.
as proof of that, many of them are not even courteous enough to supply
a proper return address, so they can prune their lists of
undeliverable mail. all they care about is getting their message
across without their paying anything whatsoever for that service.
watch how this will inevitably translate into increased costs for you,
the consumer, unless we change the mechanisms by which bulk mail is
delivered as well as putting an appropriate economic model in place.
--
mark seiden, mis(_at_)seiden(_dot_)com, 1-(415) 592 8559 (voice)