vipul@pobox.com wrote:
At 06:09 PM 8/20/96 -0700, Rich Graves wrote: <Snip> No. I think we can all (most) agree that spam-email is like junk-snailmail. In that case there are a few things to consider:
1. Junkmail requires the SENDER to pay for it, not the recipient.
Internet pricing models are complicated and debatable, but you surely end up paying for snail-junk-mail. Not directly, but hidden in the high first-class mail costs. More mail, more infrastructure, higher costs. This could be quite true for the net also, if we consider bandwidth costs money.
Actually I believe that without "junk mail" costs for regular postage would probably be higher: less mail = fewer packages over which to amortize the cost of building the infrastructure necessary for ubiquitous messaging. Direct-mail organizations get a lower rate by doing a lot of the expensive parts of post office work themselves (pre-sorting the mail by zip code, barcoding messages, etc) and not necessrily just based upon volume. For all the bitching Americans do about the high cost of first-class mail it is still the least expensive of any western nation and offers fairly good service (and the USPS actually made a profit for the last two years so it is unlikely that the cost will go up for a while...) jim