Saturday, April 09, 2005
The Spaminator and a rant about real junk mail
Jaynes was convicted in November for using false Internet addresses and aliases to send mass e-mail ads through an AOL server in Loudoun County, where America Online is based. Under Virginia law, sending unsolicited bulk e-mail itself is not a crime unless the sender masks his identity.
There are apparently any number of constitutional bases for appeal, including particularly that the defendant's connection to Virginia depends on his emails having traversed AOL's servers in Loudon County.
Without in any way defending the guy, Mrs. TigerHawk asked an interesting question. Why is it that spam is so unpopular and junk mail via the good ole USPS is not? That's a great question!
Spam, as tedious as it is, is not nearly so burdensome as the huge piles of unsolicited requests for charitable contributions, advertisements and catalogs that arrive in our out-sized mailbox six days a week. By virtually any measure (weight, pieces), more than 80% of the mail we receive is junk that we throw away unopened. It is incredibly wasteful of actual, physical resources. There is not only the pulp that goes to make the paper, but the fuel to transport all the heavy material (it adds up, especially the catalogs) and the labor that goes into delivering it. All that junk mail must, under law, be sorted into material that can be recycled and material that cannot be, so if you do not sort out the envelopes with celophane windows and the other nonconforming material, you are breaking local regulations.
Surely the waste of actual junk mail is more offensive to the environment and burdensome economically than even billions of unnecessary emails. True, with the spam there is always the risk that an erect penis or "horny mature woman" will pop up on you preview window, but for the thick-skinned secular humanists among us this is a small burden compared to the onslaught of actual junk mail. The junk mail is a much greater hassle to deal with. It isn't even close.
Indeed, the proportion of our mail, at least, that is unsolicited junk is so high, one almost wonders how the United States Postal Service would justify its existence if direct advertising disappeared. Ban the physical junk mail, and the great unwashed might wake up and realize that everything else the USPS delivers can come via FedEx or pushed through the net on electronic rails. That would be a huge gain for the economy, even if a huge loss for the frankly obnoxious USPS carrier who parks his truck down our street every afternoon so that he can catch up on his snoozing.
1 Comments:
By 
, at
Sat Apr 09, 08:27:00 AM:
You're right about the amount of junk mail through the USPS and it's likely keeping that organization alive.
The reasoning behind can spam is the same reasoning behind banning unsolicited faxes. For a fax, the sender pays nothing but a little phone usage. You pay for the phone usage to receive the fax, pay for the toner and the paper just to throw something out. Junk snail mail is the opposite. The Sender pays for the paper, ink, printing and cost of sending this to you. All you have to do it throw it away.
The problem with spam is that, unlike junk snail mail, the spammer doesn't pay anything to send it but you have to pay to receive it. The small percentage from each junk email added to your overall bandwidth use may not make any difference to the average user, but compounded it makes a HUGE difference to the ISP. If more than half of the emails sent daily went away (as spam does constitute that volume) the ISPs would have lower operating costs and may be more profitable or cheaper to the consumer or both.
have to do it throw it away.
