[SAGE] ack! nytimes OKs spam!

[deeann mikula <deeann@telerama.com>]

well, he doesn't ok spam, but here is the quote:

"And were you to send out a mass mailing, you would do the recipients
no harm...Junk e-mail annoys but does not injure."

from the sunday magazine's weekly column "the ethicist" by randy
cohen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/06/magazine/06ETHICIST.html
(hint, if you are not a nytimes-online subscriber, it's FREE, just sign up!)

once i stopped freaking out, i sat down and wrote him a letter (which
is below.)  if anyone else is feeling politically active, feel free to
write one too.  (please read the whole article first, of course, you
will find his address in it.)

ack!

deeann m.m. mikula

director of operations
telerama public access internet
http://www.telerama.com
1.877.688.3200


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Ethicist,

I commend your response regarding the ethical responsibility of your
reader to not "reply to all" and send unsolicited mail to the clients'
cc:'d addresses.  This would be both unethical and also illegal in some
states. (The Ethicist, January 6, 2002.)

However, your statement "And were you to send out a mass mailing, you
would do the recipients no harm...Junk e-mail annoys but does not
injure" is simply incorrect.

The recipient of unsolicited commercial e-mails (aka "spam e-mail") may
simply delete the offending message.  No problem, right?  Wrong, that
user has already paid heavily for the delivery of that message.  The
recipient must pay for e-mail storage, and must pay his e-mail
provider for the service.  He pays for this junk e-mail in other ways,
too: in slower transport time for his e-mail messages, in slower
access to the Internet because his Internet Service Provider's
bandwidth is being used up by junk e-mail senders.  He pays for this in
down-time to his e-mail service caused by floods of junk e-mail.

It is in these costs of providing e-mail and transport of e-mail that
the damage begins to mount up.  It is accepted that approximately 30%
of the e-mail traffic today is comprised of e-mail that no one wants,
and that figure is rising.  Someone must pay for (and support) bigger
and beefier machines to deliver this amount of e-mail, and bigger
connections to the Internet to receive and send it.  These costs are
translated into higher access costs to the consumer for the e-mail
that they want to receive.  See
http://www.cauce.org/about/problem.shtml for further discussion of the
hidden costs and problems of junk e-mail.

It is irresponsible to blithely comment "junk e-mail annoys but does
not injure."  Spam e-mail injures ALL Internet users today, whether
they are themselves unfortunate recipients of the junk or not.  Junk
e-mail is one of the largest problems faced by Internet Service
Providers today.  Comments like yours make me realize that we are far
from solving the problem of junk e-mail.


Deeann Mikula
Director of Operations, Telerama Internet, Pittsburgh, PA