From: Brian Beattie <beattie@CSOS.ORST.EDU> I disagree, one can use e-mail to steal. E-mail consumes resources, resources for which the sender may have no right to use. It's not theft if there's no direct benefit to the actor. It does consume resources, there's no argument about that. Note, however, that the scope of any such resource use is with the message as a bit sequence; no meaning or interpretation of the content is even relevant. That is, the resource use does not relate to the email as communication, merely as a technical operation. The question remains whether such resource use can ever be considered unauthorized. Certainly it's impolite; that's not at issue. I argue that if you hook your machine up to the Internet, you've implicitly authorized people to send you packets -- as many as they want and of whatever nature as they want. No service provision I've ever seen gives any recourse to the end user against the provider for "bad" packets. I also think this is the one great flaw in the design of the Internet; namely, that the sender has all the control over what packets flow over the net. A receiver can ask for a slowdown or cessation, but there's no obligation to do so. This will be, if anything, the limiting factor in scalability of the internet. Eric