Why is spam bad?
Spam is bad because it shifts the cost of advertising to the recipients. It is similar to junk unsolicited faxes. It can also be compared to an unwanted collect call to your telephone. Spam is against the acceptable use policy/terms of service of every reputable ISP, is illegal in several US states, and can result in large portions of the Internet “shunning” your company at the network level e.g.: blocking packets or not accepting your e-mail. There are various marketing organizations that claim to have a “solution to the spam problem” or a “code of conduct” that addresses the issue, but most fail to take into account several important facts: • There are real, non-zero costs involved with e-mail: network bandwidth, disk space, etc. These costs are largely borne by the recipients, not the sender. • The economics of junk e-mail are completely dissimilar to those of junk postal mail. • Case law does not support a right of e-mailers to send unsolicited materials. • E-mail boxes are (effect
I.S.P.s and their subscribers usually pay directly, or indirectly, for what they download. If the newsgroup “volume”rises due to excessive crossposting, or multi-posting, of advertising then everyone has to pay higher costs. It takes time to read newsgroup posts. If 50% of posts are “spam” then for every hour we spend reading newsgroups we have wasted half an hour. This means we have less time left to read things we really are interested in and/or to go “surfing”.
