Why is Spam a Problem?
Spamming is another form of stealing and trespass; spammers make other people pay for their messages without permission of the recipient. For example, spam steals a great deal of my time, uses up bandwidth and storage space without my permission, and makes it hard for legitimate email to reach me. And it hurts others; my web pages once made it easy for people to contact me (using “mailto:” links); the volume of spam I get has forced me to remove that capability, making it unnecessarily harder for others to contact me. Many organizations no longer post their email addresses, because their legitimate email is overwhelmed by spam. One estimate finds that spam costs 6 billion Euros a year and the cost is rising. For example, spam uses up lots of bandwidth and disk space that the recipient has to pay for. A Washington Post article dated March 13, 2003 also discusses spam. They quote Brightmail Inc.’s report that roughly 40% of all e-mail traffic in the United States is spam (up from 8% in l
