On Thu, Dec 04, 1997 at 01:27:35AM -0500, Jim Wise wrote:
> > There are people who have to pay extra for all foreign data transfers,
> > including mail.
> 
> This type of billing scheme is obscene.  If you are in a position where
> the more mail you receive the more you pay, and you have no way to
> filter incoming mail before you get billed for it, I think you need to
> have a long look at whether your access provider or spam is the root
> problem here...

Unfortunately, it seems that all companies providing permanent Internet
connections use traffic based billing schemes.  Some have a limit for
monthly foreign transfers and if you transfer too much data, you get a
larger bill.  Some (like mine) use a priority system: the more data you
transfer, the slower your connection becomes.  You can buy more bandwidth
with money - but I can't see any point in paying more to receive the
spam more quickly.

I'm currently using some sendmail spam filtering stuff which refuses to
receive the message at all, so the only traffic caused by known spammers
is the initial SMTP handshake stuff.  Still, I get several spam messages
to my own account alone every day - I don't know how many messages arrive
in the 100 mail boxes of the other users (I can't use very strict spam
rejection rules on the public machines, obviously).

> I hate spam, too.  I would love to take down my procmail filters and
> know that my inbox will not be obese by day's end.  I would love to
> regain the time I spend updating my spam filters.  What I would not love
> is to see the precedent established that local governments have the
> right to regulate what content can be exchanged over an international
> distributed medium.

I am against all mass-mailing and e-mail address collecting in Internet.
I don't mind people sending ads to those _who want to receive them_ but
I can't see any need for these blind spams to all known e-mail addresses
in the world.  If someone wants to advertise a product, they can do it
on WWW or in some suitable newsgroup.  I think freedom of speech and
spam are two very different things.  Of course, I'm looking at this on
the ISP's side - I pay for the traffic, I pay for the disk space, I pay
for the time used to update spam filters.  I pay for all those idiots
advertising their products - products that I will never buy.  (Many
messages were only ment for the ppl in US - why do they send even those
spams to all around the world?).  This can't be right.

Sorry, I'm just sick of this problem... ;)  Despite of my filters, I
have received almost 900 spam messages in a year.  According to the
logs, lots of messages have been rejected.  If every user in our domain
receives 1500 spam messages a year... yikes. :-(

  -jm