It's free speech ...

“Spam is free speech. If you try to stop spam, you're promoting censorship.”

Spam usually consists of advertisements, which are classed as 'commercial speech'. Most countries have laws about what can and cannot be shown or said in advertisements, but few people would claim that this is anti-democratic.

In the USA, even commercial speech is only protected if it's lawful and not misleading. Most spam immediately fails this test.

Finally, you may have the right to say what you think, but you don't have the right to use other people's resources to convey your message.

It's the price you have to pay

“Spam is the price you pay for the convenience of using the Internet. It's like adverts on TV, or on public transport.”

Adverts on TV or public transport are paid for by the advertiser. The payments made reduce the cost of the service for the consumer. Spam is just the opposite: the spammmer pays nothing and ISPs have to bear the cost of carrying the spam (or installing filters to block it). The ISPs pass their costs on to the consumer, who ends up paying more to get adverts that they don't want.

All you have to do is hit DELETE ...

“If you don't like it, all you have to do is hit the DELETE key.”

Just hit DELETE' may work fine for one message a day, but not for the hundreds that most people now receive. It is very time-consuming to wade through an unfiltered mailbox and pick out the few pieces of real mail among the junk. Moreover, spammers do everything in their power to ensure that you don't delete the message until you've read it, using misleading subject lines and fake sender names to try to trick you into opening it. These tricks make it still more difficult for you to 'just hit DELETE', and increase the chance that you may delete something of real importance by mistake.

Moreover, 'just hit DELETE' doesn't help users on slow or expensive connections: by the time they get to delete the spam, they've already paid the cost in time or money of downloading it.

You can set up filters to 'just hit DELETE' for you, but developing good filters that catch spams without deleting legitimate mail is time-consuming and difficult. Spammers make the task harder by constantly changing their messages and delivery techniques to get around filters or reduce their effectiveness.

It doesn't cost you anything ...

“People complain too much about the cost of downloading spam. A mail message downloads in seconds, so it hardly costs anything.”

By the same reasoning, a single insect eats very little, therefore insect pests are not a problem for agriculture.

Individual users on slow or expensive connections may pay a significant cost in both time and money in order to download the thousands of unwanted messages that they receive every month. The problem is several orders of magnitude worse for ISPs, who must allocate resources to carry not thousands but tens of millions of pieces of junk mail every month.

You asked for it ...

“By publishing your address on Usenet or a Web page, you're asking people to send you mail. You have no right to complain.”

It takes a truly twisted mind to see the logic of this argument. Putting your address on a website or a Usenet posting is a way to let people contact you about the site or the posting, not a request to be sent invitations to sign up for pyramid schemes or 419 scams. My phone number does not appear in the telephone directory because I'm worried that my penis is too small and I'd like someone to help me with that.

If posting your address is a request to be sent mail, then 'munging' your mail address by putting a word such as NOSPAM in the middle of it (as many people now do when posting an address publicly) says about as clearly as you can say it that you don't want any spam. Spammers devote large amounts of energy to deconstructing 'munged' addresses (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) so that they can send spam to the recovered address.

Most people don't mind spam ...

“Most people don't mind getting spam.”

In a 2003 survey on spam carried out by TACD, 96% of those surveyed said that they either hated spam or found it irritating. Other surveys have produced similar results.

Anti-spammers are communist control freaks ...

“Anti-spammers are Communist control freaks who hate commerce.”


What most people resent about spam and UCE is not that they're commercial, but that they're an intrusion. Few of those who feel strongly about spam are opposed to Internet commerce. What they are opposed to is the deluge of unwanted material appearing in their inboxes, the waste of time and resources that it entails, and the abuse

  NEXT WEEK - Lies spammers tell you------------------