Spam Control Considered Harmful

Wed Oct 29 21:40:01 UTC 1997

On Wed, Oct 29, 1997 at 08:29:52PM +0000, Matt Ryan wrote:

> > This sounds nice and principled but who is going to pay the bill for
> > the spam? It's non-trivial.
> 
> The spammers pay by hooking up with an ISP. How do your customers pay the
> recipients of their messages for them downloading them? Have you not noticed
> that email delivery is a cooperative process?

Actually, Karl would be the first to point out that often spammers don't pay
.. they hook up for their free trial period and get the boot a few days
later.

The presumption made when you send somebody an email message is that they
wish to read what you have to type. Nobody wants spam, so if you send it to
them, you are wasting their time and their Internet connection.

The whole point of spam being wrong is that since it is a cooperative
process, it costs the recipient to receive it. (Contrast this to bulk postal
mail, which only costs the sender anything.)

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