Re: Spamming (Good or Bad?)

["Paul S. Penrod" <furballs@netcom.com>]

On Tue, 20 Aug 1996, Timothy C. May wrote:

> At 5:16 AM 8/21/96, Paul S. Penrod wrote:
> >On Tue, 20 Aug 1996, Ross Wright wrote:
> 
> >> Market Droids????  As a salesman I take offence at this slur.
> 
> Sales droids are subservient to market droids...sort of like R2D2, a sales
> droid, getting his marching orders from C3PO, a market droid.
> 
> 
> >As for spamming, I get enough of it via snail-mail, I don't want to see
> >it in my Inbox too. And, for the record, there are lots of people out
> >there who pay on the bulk charge, not by time. Sending advertising or
> >junk mail to these folks costs them money, maybe not much for the one
> >message you sent, but several thousand over a month of a quarter add up
> >to real money.
> >
> >There is a time and place for legitimate advertising. I am sure that
> >given time and impetus, a number of clear channel venues will open up to
> >allow precision marketing and sales to happen electronicly.
> >
> >At the moment, it's bad nettiquette...
> 
> The basic problem is that, unlike paper mail, it costs a sender essentially
> nothing to send nearly any size file to as many people as he wishes. This
> is the basic economic fact of the Net at this time. Until this eventually
> changes, spamming will be with us.
> 
> (I understand experts in the field of "spamming" have various names for
> various flavors: spam, velveeta, jerky, etc. I'll call them all "unwanted
> messages.")
> 
> The problem is one of economics and allocation of costs. Other industries
> have the same issues:
> 
> * fax machines: costs of paper are borne by receiver, leading to high bills
> when "junk faxes" are received (and hence some laws restricting such faxes)
> 
> * cellular phones: receiver of calls usually is charged air time. Thus,
> "junk calls" cost money.
> 
> (My physical mailbox probably gets about $1 a day of junk mail, in terms of
> postage paid. More, in terms of costs to print catalogs, fliers, freebies,
> etc. It takes me about 20 seconds, tops, to decide what to discard
> immediately and what to save, so at this point "their costs" > "my costs.")
> 
> In my view, attempting to legislate what is "junk" and what is not junk is
> misguided. (And I suspect it rarely works in halting junk mail.) Junk is in
> the eye of the beholder.
> 
> There are technological fixes which I would favor over attempts to ban
> unwanted messages.
> 
> --Tim May
> 

I agree about the technological fixes. When enough people figure out or 
are shown how to block unwanted messages, the economics of scale 
disappear real fast. Unfortunately, there will always be a ready supply 
of the unwitting, and government's reaction is to legislate rather than 
educate.

Practically, it would be better to allow and promote a technological 
outlet for all of this, as it will never go away, so long as the medium 
exists.

...Paul