Re: Spamming

[Anonymous <remailer@htp.org>]

On Wed, 29 Jul 1998, Art1Carol wrote:

> 
> I do not spam! I don't think....The Government Lets it's post office's
> around the country spam everyone every day, for the postage Don't we wish we
> had a delete button for that?

Hello, McFly? Anybody home? McFly!

When somebody sends mail through the postal service, they pay postage. It
costs the recipient nothing and, if anything, is actually useful for
getting a fire started in the winter. When somebody spams through the
Internet, they pay virtually nothing, yet everybody else gets to pay to
deliver, store, and filter the shit. Then there are the morons who connect
to other peoples' machines and use those to relay mail; that's quite
obviously theft.

Take your spam, for instance. You go out and pay MSN a bit of money for
some account. You mail the Cypherpunks list with your ad for porn or
whatever it was. The list operators then have to deliver it to a few
thousand people. You steal the resources of the CDR operators to deliver
it. You steal the resources of the Cypherpunks to store it. You steal CPU
time all over the place to filter it. You steal bandwidth all over the
place to deliver it.

This is obvious to anybody with more than a few dozen brain cells to rub
together. Then again, this kind of grammatically-challenged and logically
invalid garbage is what I've come to expect from users of lame services
like AOL, Prodigy, MSN, Hotmail, et al. It goes with the territory for
sites which cater to the lowest common denominator.

> I do believe each provider should have a block for unsolicited email and
> instruct their customers how to use it, and if they don't, Spam Away...

Right, and they still get to pay for the transmission, temporary storage,
filtering, etc.

Let's see. Say I filter it. My ISP gets the spam. It has to store it. I
log into the POP3 server to get my mail. I have to transfer it. After it's
been stored on the ISP for quite a while, after it's been transmitted,
after it's eaten my bandwidth, and after I've waited around for it to
transfer, I have to blow CPU time to filter it. 

Yeah, like in postal junk mail the sender is really the one paying, not
the recipient. 

Your clue check has bounced.

[Remainder of drivel snipped.]

Copy to MSN. Copy to the Cypherpunks list for the other lamers who like to
spam it.