spam

What's Wrong with Spam

excerpts from the Spamcon Foundation website

Unsolicited email ("spam") forces unwanted and objectionable materials into our mailboxes, impairs our ability to communicate freely, and costs Internet users billions of dollars annually.

Unsolicited email, or "spam", is detrimental to society in several ways:

• Cost.
  The costs of spam are disproportionately borne by the ultimate recipient and network resource owners who pass the message along.

• Trespass.
  Spam involves manipulation of third-party resources -- sometimes against the expressly stated wishes of the affected parties.

• Privacy and control.
  Every email address becomes a target for spam as soon as it's created, undermining the end user's control of that mailbox.

• Medium for fraud.
  Because email is an anonymous medium, spam has become a prime vector for fraudulent and otherwise illegal activities.

Spam is responsible for an estimated 10 percent increase in Internet access costs across the board, as the public must dedicate bandwidth, storage space, time and attention to its transit, while the sender pays almost nothing. Its damages fall disproportionately on the poor (who may not have many choices for email access), the less-educated (who may not be able to create systems to stem its flow), the rural (who may pay for Internet access by the minute), and the disabled (who may have difficulty handling email in bulk). As such, spam significantly deepens the digital divide, and harms the public at large.

Impacts of spam:

• Spam substantially increases ISPs' costs, which are passed on to consumers. In 1997, America Online estimated that between 5% and 30% of its email server time at any given moment was exclusively dedicated to handling spam.
  
  
• Between $2-3 of a consumer's monthly Internet bill is for handling spam, according to the 1998 Washington State Commercial Electronic Messages Select Task Force Report .
  
  
• 7% of Internet users who switch ISPs do so because of spam. This translates to a loss by attrition of more then $250,000 per month for an ISP with 1 million subscribers. Reported by the Gartner Group in 1999.
  
  
• Spam increases the Digital Divide. In its 1999 report, "Falling through the Net II: Defining the Digital Divide", the National Telecommunications and Information Administration found that 16.8 percent of all households that own a computer do not access the Internet for reasons of cost -- a cost that is $2-3 higher because of spam.
  
  
• Rural email users pay more. Users who have few or no local choices in Internet service providers may further pay per-minute ISP and/or toll call fees to receive each piece of spam.
  
  
• Spam disproportionately affects disabled email users. For blind or sight-impaired users who employ a speech-synthesis device to read email, spam represents additional time delay in accessing information. For mobility-impaired users, deleting excess email and weeding out spam may be difficult or painful. Finally, spam decreases the utility of email-enabled text pagers used by deaf persons for immediate remote communications.

For the general public, the costs of receiving spam include:

• diversion of time
• loss of productivity
• loss of control over their online privacy, computer and Internet connection

In addition, spam can dampen free speech on the Internet, as reported by The Center for Democracy and Technology's Ad Hoc Working Group on Unsolicited Commercial Email:

"The most dangerous, if least easily quantified cost, is the damage that unsolicited commercial email (UCE) can cause to the reputation of email... UCE can have a chilling effect on individuals' speech in that individuals may be reluctant to participate in online forums and Usenet groups, or may remove their email addresses from home pages for fear of getting their email addresses placed on mailing lists for UCE."

The SpamCon Foundation is a public benefit corporation that advocates for the mitigation of spam. Through its programming, it provides a forum for Internet users, administrators, marketers, anti-spam businesses and activists to collaborate and develop strategies that encourage responsible email marketing. SpamCon Foundation's goal is to allow email users optimal control over the mail they receive.

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