On Thursday, February 23, 2006 3:30 PM -0600, David Reed wrote: > (Which is not to detract from what a wonderful piece of coding that > SpamBayes is, mind you...it is. But in the grand scheme of things, > REAL, paper, junk mail, is far more damaging and offensive, in my > opinion.
For the case of large email systems, I beg to differ. With postal mail, the sender pays the postage, while in email, the recipient pays. The recipient's cost is incoming bandwidth, processing time related infrastructure such as DNS and system engineering time. Since most incoming email today is spam, if you accept and filter all of it, spam is becoming the largest cost contributor of operating a mail system. Because so much spam is sent using hijacked resources, the sender pays virtually nothing for sending millions of messages. In aggregate, this cost of receiving and filtering spam by mail servers is paid by all recipients through higher internet connectivity fees. Where I live, junk postal mail goes into the recycle bin with other waste paper. Like many localities, our city does subsidize recycling costs, and mixed paper is not a money-maker. So junk postal mail does raise my local taxes to a small degree, but it doesn't have the nearly same impact as spam on the cost of internet connectivity. It would obviously help if the Post Office would adjust bulk-mailing rates and, get ready for a laugh, share some revenues with localities to dispose of the mountain of junk they deliver at bargain rates. This is in the same spirit as the WEEE directive passed by the European Parliament to deal with the disposal costs of used electronic equipment. Basically, the producer has to pay for that up front, and the same should be true for junk postal mail. -- Seth Goodman _______________________________________________ [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/spambayes Check the FAQ before asking: http://spambayes.sf.net/faq.html
