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The mail you get in your mailbox is being paid by someone to be sent. Not so with spam.
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Typical liberal rhetoric. *chortle* just kidding.. just wanted to know what it was like to be Torone for a minute :P
Seriously though. That is IMHO the AntiSpam lobby propaganda.
I'll confess. Ok. I Admit it.. I send mail. It's profitable. But it costs me nothing to send it? For hosting alone.. that means sending email and having a landing page we spend no less than $15000 a month. And we dont send *that much* mail compared to some people.
I think it's important to define the two different kinds of mailers.
Type A ) The mailer who spends bookoo bucks on quality targeted lists (or at least steals good ones ;-).... mails responsibly (e.g. has a huge removal lists, honor those removals immediately, doesnt forge headers)
Type B ) The mailer who spends $99 on a cd, harvests names, mails using other people's servers, doesnt honor removes (if they even offer a remove option) and bears neither the burden or accountability.
Type B is what people realy mean when they say that spam doesnt cost anything.
Additionally, I would make the following argument:
With snail mail, sending regular mail is not free. It costs 38cents i think? Sending bulk snail mail comes out to far far far far less... i believe around 8 cents per mailer... add a few pennies for the actual paper and ink itself unless it's a really fancy mailer.
With Email... sending bulk mail is not free. Consumers however enjoy sending and receiving as much email as they want for free. Whether you send 1000 personal emails or 1 personal email a month your costs stay the same... just the cost of connectivity. With bulk mail your costs go UP the more you send and you have to pay for servers etc..etc.
People tend to make the argument that postal mail direct marketers bear a cost while email marketers do not. I say that is bullshit. Email marketers do spend a lot of money, and unlike our snail mail brethren, we pay far more per mail to send email than a consumer does.
FINALLY... the worst argument i hear, and i heard it over and over again during the cspan broadcast of the recent ftc forum on spam.. is that people dont have a choice of whether to "download" the message from the server. Sure. That's the nature of email. It's not my fault they set the email system up in a dumb way. But it's no different than the paper world. When you go to your mail box, you get a pamphlet, a catalog, an ad for a morgage or a credit card... you have to pull it out of the mail box. If you leave it there, after just a week your mailman stops delivery of your mail or at least starts throwing your mali in your yard.. and then you have to hoof your happy ass back to the house, straight to the garbage pail and throw away a little piece of tree that died just for that mail.
Today i checked my mailbox. Had nothing but ads, coupons, credit card ads and menus. I didnt "opt in".. i cant opt out.. i had to carry it.. i had to dispose of it.. and i caused more waste. Now you tell me that email is really any more of a burden on the consumer than snail junk mail.
Amen & pass the collection plate.
Last edited by Hooper at May 14 2003, 09:18 PM