Something nobody has mentioned in comparing spam to junk snail mail -- mass mailings practically fund the post office. If there was no junk mail, sending a letter would cost you a few dollars instead of 37 cents (on par with sending a letter via UPS or FedEx). With snail mail, the advertiser pays the Post Office. With TV advertising, the advertiser pays the station for ad time. With Spam, the Advertiser steals bandwidth and forces the various ISPs to pay unwillingly for the emails to be sent, AND pay for Filters, Firewalls, Technical staff, and all the other expensive costs of keeping email useful in the wake of floods of illegitimate email. Also, many email accounts outside the US require the user to pay _per email_ that they recieve (I understand that that is common in the UK, for example).

It's not merely an "inconvenience" -- it's effectively destruction of property to the tune of billions of dollars worldwide.

Also, it's not just sending emails, it's fraud. The "proper procedures" that you decry that they _should_ follow are thus: You're not allowed to lie about who you are, where you are, what you're selling, or how someone can get off your list. Spam emails lie about who sent them, and how to get removed from the list (for several months my father kept diligently following every "remove me" link on every freaking porn email he got, and was ripping his hair out with the increasing tides of crap coming into his email box, until the account was rendered totally useless! His dialup account took almost an hour to download it all -- that is FAR MORE than mere annoyance). They lie about the topic of the email, they put in fake links that appear to go one place but really go to another. Fraud is a crime.

People are not (primarily) complaining about legitimate companies sending out advertising. I've never subscribed to porno magazines, but I get floods of porno spam. I get baldness cures; I get Ads for Viagra; hornoy housewives; I get ads for pyramid schemes; for mortgages; for bankruptcy lawyers; -- none of this has _ANYTHING_ to do with me!

A legitimate business will stop sending these to you if you ask. Spammers will take any contact (in fact any evidence whatsoever that you've even set eyes on the email) as incentive to send you twice as much. Don't try to act as though they are legitimate businessmen and the mean ol' government is being unfair. THEY are being unfair to the Internet-using public, and time has proven that public sanctions (i.e. criminal penalties) are the only thing that might convince them to stop. So be it.

As to the "jungle vs/ zoo" argument: how do you propose individuals stop emails short of never giving out their address?

I've gone to extraordinary means to prevent spam, and it works pretty well, but... I'm a techie and can do that kind of stuff in my sleep. My non-techie mom, my non-techie friends, and so forth should not have to hire a professional to set up their computers just so they can use something as basic as email.

As far as I'm concerned, Spam, Spyware and Viruses are indistinguishable -- they are all direct assaults on other people's legitimate use of their own computers, perpetrated solely for the financial or "thrill" benefit of the perpetrator.

The ONLY way to stop them is to make it not even close to "worth it", and the way to do that is to nail the slimeballs to the wall.


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