At 05:03 PM 2/15/98 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:

Then you are saying that the only way to send email to yourself, for example, is to contact you prior to the transmission and obtain your permission to send the traffic?

That's fine - people who take this approach may get less mail from interesting people as well as getting less mail from spammers. It's easy to find mail forwarding systems that don't cost much and will filter out well-known spam, either for free or for a small fee. Pobox.com offers this, and I think the iname.com systems do also; I don't know about hotmail and other web-based mailreaders.

Why should the fact that I have a mailbox on my front porch while you use a mailbox (that you pay extra for) at the post office matter to my ability to send you a letter in the mail? Should I call you on the phone and ask your permission before sending it? Should I not get some mechanism to contact you before contacting you using the phone? No ,I assume because local calls are flat rate and therefore don't increase your out of pocket expense? Then perhaps the problem is you're choice of payment for net connections? Why does your choice of personal expense effect my ability to send traffic?

Most of us have flat-rate email, and the important cost is our attention span, not the transmission cost. For other people, that's not true, and sending them junk mail _is_ ripping them off financially as well as ripping off their time and concentration. As far as "how do you know something is bulk mail"? The sender knows, and the sender is the one being rude to thousands of receivers if it is bulk mail.

If we accept the free-market view then we should expect all net connections to be flat rate since this provides the consumer, the final arbiter in free-market theory, the most bang for the buck.

This does not apply in countries that still have Government-granted Monopoly Postal/Telephone/Telegraph companies. It also doesn't apply in places where the Telephone Company decides to charge for connect time by the minute rather than flat rate - even if your internet provider is flat rate, you may be paying 1-5 cents/minute - mildly annoying on a US salary, and much more so on a Polish salary. And in a free market, you'd expect a mix of options, since different people have different net connection needs, financial constraints, and communications costs. My main ISP offers an 800 number for about 10 cents/minute, and I sometimes use it when I'm on the road at hotels with stupider-than-usual telephone systems. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639