On Wed, 29 Jul 1998, Art1Carol wrote:

I do not spam! I don't think....The Government Lets it's post office's around the country spam everyone every day, for the postage Don't we wish we had a delete button for that?

Hello, McFly? Anybody home? McFly! When somebody sends mail through the postal service, they pay postage. It costs the recipient nothing and, if anything, is actually useful for getting a fire started in the winter. When somebody spams through the Internet, they pay virtually nothing, yet everybody else gets to pay to deliver, store, and filter the shit. Then there are the morons who connect to other peoples' machines and use those to relay mail; that's quite obviously theft. Take your spam, for instance. You go out and pay MSN a bit of money for some account. You mail the Cypherpunks list with your ad for porn or whatever it was. The list operators then have to deliver it to a few thousand people. You steal the resources of the CDR operators to deliver it. You steal the resources of the Cypherpunks to store it. You steal CPU time all over the place to filter it. You steal bandwidth all over the place to deliver it. This is obvious to anybody with more than a few dozen brain cells to rub together. Then again, this kind of grammatically-challenged and logically invalid garbage is what I've come to expect from users of lame services like AOL, Prodigy, MSN, Hotmail, et al. It goes with the territory for sites which cater to the lowest common denominator.

I do believe each provider should have a block for unsolicited email and instruct their customers how to use it, and if they don't, Spam Away...

Right, and they still get to pay for the transmission, temporary storage, filtering, etc. Let's see. Say I filter it. My ISP gets the spam. It has to store it. I log into the POP3 server to get my mail. I have to transfer it. After it's been stored on the ISP for quite a while, after it's been transmitted, after it's eaten my bandwidth, and after I've waited around for it to transfer, I have to blow CPU time to filter it. Yeah, like in postal junk mail the sender is really the one paying, not the recipient. Your clue check has bounced. [Remainder of drivel snipped.] Copy to MSN. Copy to the Cypherpunks list for the other lamers who like to spam it.