🚀 go-pugleaf

Buzz wrote in message <351588AF.F1267329@hotmail.com>...
>
>
>Forget spam being the threat, try those stupid brochures, mags& flyers in
your
>real mailbox, and what's worse is they have to be
>disposed of afterwards. (Paper, inks) At least with spam, it
>can be cleanly "nuked" or filtered. (no tree's required)
>Unless you run a mail server or your an ISP, then the resources
>aren't yours to lose. You rent them. If they fall to an unexceptable
>level, then you change ISP's. Hey, it may force your ISP to upgrade


If your ISP has to upgrade to 5 UltraSparcs for mail simply to deal with all
the spam, who do you think pays for that? All that hardware has to come from
somewhere.

That's right -- you pay for it. And because all ISPs have to deal with spam,
there is no getting away from that cost. ISPs also have to pay for whole
departments of staff to handle the abuse complaints that pour in from both
their users, and others complaining about spam sent *from* the ISP.

This is all *very* real, and *very* epxensive. Don't delude yourself --
there are very very real expenses and costs to spam. Make no mistake about
it.

>his servers. I feel that censorship is by far the greatest threat to the
>internet, not my ability (or lack of) to deal with spam. Everyone should
>be able to connect and share their idea's, products, services.

Sorry - your right to spew stops at my mailbox. The mere fact that I
participate in the Internet does not give you the right to place "FREE
MADAGA$CAR LEMMING$ NOW!!!!!!" in full HTML day after day after day in my
mailbox. And I *will* exercise my right to complain to your ISP about
sending it, if you do send it. And *they* can exercise their right to
terminate your services, which they most likely will. Spammers are more
trouble than they are worth as a customer.


>This is a free country, even for spammers.

It is news to me that theft of services is included in the ideals of a "free
country." And almost all spammers steal resources. Does a spammer use his
own mail server? Nope - he queues his crap up on open mail servers on other
networks where he has not asked for permission to use these computer
resources (and often taking down that mail server in the process.) They fake
their reply addresses, often with cutesy reply addresses such as
Hereiam@thekeyboard.com, causing the real domain thekeyboard.com to plug up
with angry replies and bounces to the errors on the spammers mailing lists.
There are very real costs here. You might want to go buy a clue about spam
before you pontificate about it.

>I get a lot more upset at seeing my little mailbox stuffed with
>advertisements and brochures that I have no interest in. Especially
>when I throw them into a large bin in our mailroom, only to see
>a huge stack of them that others in the high-rise had throw away
>as well. I would say that 95% of them were in the trash. This
>happens everyday. That is "real" wasted resource that will
>hurt us more in the long run. Even if they do the recycle thing,
>Its not as environmentally clean as spam in cyberspace.

What does the one have to do with the other? Have you noticed your
snail-mail junk mail slow down even one iota since the advent of spam?

You haven't -- because it hasn't. In fact, all of the stolen services on the
Internet, and the damage caused to networks such as AOL (which believes that
about 30% of their mail traffic now is unwanted junk) and joes.com (which
got blown off the Internet by a spammer pretending to be from there) has not
done ONE DAMNED THING to slow down paper-based junk mail.

This is a complete red herring.

>What's an 18Gb HD going to be worth compared to a tree
>for your great grandchildren to climb?
>I do not defend spam, I have never spammed, Spam sucks.
>I just don't preserve it such a deadly threat.


Oh, its an awful lot worse than you are allowing for. Anti-spammers may be
the only thing standing between you and a completely unusable mailbox.

--
  Richard K Bethell (cj434@freenet.carleton.ca)
* NCF Net Abuse Response Team member | CAUCE Member
* NCF Help Desk Coordinator *  Helping users use FreeNet
* visit my PostScript page at http://www.ncf.carleton.ca/~cj434 *