Paper SPAM

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2003 15:06:21 -0700
From: Anthony Watson <atrigueiro () yahoo com>
Subject: Paper SPAM
X-Sender: antwa () mail dollarsandsense com
To: dave () farber net

Hello Mr. Farber:

My email box has been choked with SPAM for nearly a year now and it shows 
no signs of getting any better.  Still I understand the motivations. If 
bulk emailers were more responsible with their implementation of an 
unsubscribe links and there were better ways to nab "header forgers", then 
I probably would have no beef at all with the current state of affairs.  I 
realize that people have to make a living and why I did not think the 
"do-not-call" list was a good idea, because it is definitely putting people 
out of work in an already bad job climate.

Therefore I guess I probably disagree with the more Draconian proposals to 
"can SPAM' that I have seen on the IP.  I eventually  decided to start 
keeping track of the percentage of snail mail I receive that is unsolicited 
marketing.  There has never been a day when even 50% of the pieces of mail 
were not unsolicited marketing and most of the time it is more like 25-30% 
of the mail in my physical mailbox is legitimate correspondence and most of 
that bills.

There have been many days where there was no "legit" mail, but today was a 
particularly bad day.  I received over 40 pieces of marketing mail and 
several were very heavy catalogs, but not a single piece of "legit" 
correspondence.  I admit that my legit email vs. unsolicited email ratio is 
rarely over 20%, but the numbers seem pretty close enough to me.  Why does 
the Supreme Court say that the Constitution protects unsolicited snail 
mail, but not email?  Is this an objective decision or one based on the 
fact that the USG makes money on bulk snail mail?

I trust the IP to have a diversity of opinion on this one.

Thanks,
AW

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