Bill Cunningham <billcu@citynet.net> schrieb/wrote: > I'm no fan of spam but we all get snail mail ads don't we? Shouldn't > advertisers of a possibly good product be allowed to e-mail adverstise? There are a lot of differences between snail mail and email ads: . With snail mail, the advertiser pays production and postage. With email, the recipient has to pay his/her own provider. . Snail mail is expensive enough to regulate the amount of mail you get. Email on the other hand is so cheap for the sender that the amount of mail you can send is nearly unlimited. . Snail mail ads can be sorted out more easily, usually even without opening the envelope. Email ads provide much less information on the outside (i.e. what MUAs usually show in the message list). Most spam senders even try to make that as difficult as possible now. . In some countries, there are institutions that allow recipients to opt-out for all commercial snail mail. There's no such working solution for email. BTW, national legislations don't seem to help much. I do get a lot of national spam (i.e. in German language), although German laws forbid sending unsolicited email (not explicitly, but the German Bundegerichts- hof ruled it to fall under unfair competition laws). Claus -- ------------------------ http://www.faerber.muc.de/ ------------------------ OpenPGP: DSS 1024/639680F0 E7A8 AADB 6C8A 2450 67EA AF68 48A5 0E63 6396 80F0