It eats up your valuable time. You might not see it for what it is, but it is an interruption of normal service. It's annoying as having your pager go off durring sex and having to call back your boss instead of ignoring it. (Presume you can't shut off your pager.) It takes away from the continuity of life.
You can't even come up with a valid analogy. Any pager I've ever carried could be put in silent mode. With email, you decide when to check it, and if you have two brain cells to rub together you can identify and kill spam reliably on just the Subject and Sender data, without reading it. To reiterate, it takes me less time to manually kill spam than to trash the junk in my snail mail. Spam is simply Not A Big Problem, and much less an irritation than telemarketer calls.
Asside from this, when everyone finally figures out how to MIME encrypt images, movies, sounds, etc. into their E-Mails, the net will become a sespool of junk mail w/ 16-bit images that only really use 16 colors, constantly flowng to and fro in a broth. Try to go to world-famous sites? Ha! Spam is there, too. The net can only handle so much, and spam by tradition isn't high on the list.
What do you propose?
Have every sendmail server use a PK scheme to talk to every other server and authenticate the connection. Have every sendmail server accept mail only from those whose key is verified.
Oh boy. Mandatory signing, with registered keys. Great. Why not also require people to have their SSN's tattooed on the inside of their forearms? That way, if some one is so foolish as to say something you didn't want to hear, you'll know who to sue 'for the theft of your valuable time'.
When this happens, two problems arise: (1) people (not to forget Gov) will have a reason to break singing codes (2) confidence in the system will make signing fraud a very happy-day bussiness. I would suggest, we all send a bit of spam out, 'accidentally' freeze the net and show people what can happen. Asside from this personality change, little can be done to keep people from sending spam (or, for that matter, pesonal letters). -Brandon Crosby