[81153] in Cypherpunks
Spam costs and questions
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Declan McCullagh)
Wed Jun 4 16:25:35 1997
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 1997 12:45:38 -0700 (PDT)
From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Reply-To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
A friend who's going to be speaking on one of the FTC panels next week
sent me a few questions about spam. Does anyone want to try their hand at
answering them? I'll forward along all responses I get.
What are the costs to consumers of
unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it
takes to delete it might be one, hard
drive space might be another. I would
like to know how to quantify it, and
compare it with the cost of sending
e-mail.
If you banned commercial e-mail,
wouldn't it just affect legitimate
commercial transactions? That is to say,
wouldn't fly-by-night pyramid-scheme
builders still be able to spam? I would
think that if they are so untraceable
that it's hard to block their spam that
it wouldn't really matter if it were
simply made illegal.
-Declan
