At 11:45 AM 12/18/96 -0500, Tim Dennee wrote:
 
>[snip]
 
Just a little information to put this all into proper perspective:
 
~~~
 
"Why is spam bad?
 
Q. Why do we get soooo upset when we receive E-mail which was not requested?
 
There are several reasons:
 
   1. The free ride. E-mail spam is unique in that the receiver pays so much
more for it than the sender does. For example, AOL has said that they're
receiving 1.8 million spams from Cyber Promotions per day. Assuming that it
takes the typical AOL user only 10 seconds to identify and discard a
message, that's still $15,000 of connect time per day spent discarding their
spam, just on AOL. By contrast, the spammer probably has a T1 line that
costs him about $100/day. No other kind of advertising costs the advertiser
so little, and the recipient so much. The closest analogy I can think of
would be auto-dialing junk phone calls to cellular users, and you can
imagine how favorably that might be received.
 
   2. It's all garbage. The spam messages I've seen have almost without
exception advertised stuff that's worthless, deceptive, and partly or
entirely fraudulent. (I include the many MLMs in here, even though the
MLM-ers rarely understand why there's no such thing as a good MLM.) It's
spam software, funky miracle cures, vaguely described get rich quick
schemes, dial-a-porn, and so on downhill from there. It's all stuff that's
too cruddy to be worth advertising in any medium where they'd actually have
to pay the cost of the ads. Also, since the cost of spamming is so low,
there's no point in targeting your ads, when for the same low price you can
send the ads to everyone, increasing the noise level the rest of us have to
deal with.
 
   3. They're all crooks. Spam software invariably comes with a list of
names falsely claimed to be of people who've said they want to receive ads,
but actually culled at random from usenet or mailing lists. Spam software
often promises to run on a provider's system in a way designed to hard for
the provider to detect so they can't tell what the spammer is doing. Spams
invariably say they'll remove names on request, but I have yet to hear of
any that actually do. Indeed, someone I know registered a newly created
address on a "no spam" web page, and promptly started to receive spam at
that address. Spammers know that people don't want to hear from them, and
generally put fake return addresses on their messages so that they don't
have to bear the cost of receiving responses from people to whom they've
sent messages. Whenever possible, they use "disposable" trial ISP accounts
so the ISP bears the cost of cleaning up after them. I could go on, but you
get the idea. It's hard to think of another line of business where the
general ethical level is so low.
 
Any one of these three would be enough to make me pretty unhappy about
getting junk e-mail. Put them together and it's intolerable."
 
From: Report Responsible Net Commerce -
John Levine / Trumansburg NY / Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for
Dummies" and Information Superhighwayman wanna-be:
        http://www.vix.com/spam/spambad.html
 
Cheers,
 
--Lenny__