On Sun, 08 Dec 2002 20:09:24 EST, Bill Cunningham said: > Lloyd, in the US we pay .37 to mail a first-class letter. I don't know how > many pence you pay in the UK but we still have "spam" bulk rate unwanted > solicitations. Forcing the sender to pay doesn't solve a spam problem. I > don't see how in could. It would force everyone to have to pay a price. On the flip side, although I still receive a fair number of postal bulk rate advertisements, they differ in several respects from e-mail spam: 1) They tend to be much more targeted, and as a result more likely to be of interest. I get flyers from local supermarkets that I don't actually shop at, but at least I don't get flyers for supermarkets 3 time zones away. 2) The cost per item tends to keep the total volume down. 3) Almost all the postal advertisements I receive are for legitimate groups who wish to engage in legitimate business (or sometimes charity) transactions. Very little of the e-mail spam strikes me as legitimate.... The price-per-item is the main driving force on all three (although with the third, the fact that large-scale fraud via the mails can get you prison time helps control that problem as well). Remember - in 6,000 years (and probably longer) we have yet to find a way to totally stop scams and con artists. However, we've gotten fairly good at at least curtailing their activities to the point that society can function. We don't need a 100% perfect anti-spam solution. Like most societal ills, if we can fix 98% of it, we can move on. -- Valdis Kletnieks Computer Systems Senior Engineer Virginia Tech
Attachment:
pgp00166.pgp
Description: PGP signature