Introduction

Irrespective of the laws of whatever land a spammer, or a spam victim, is in, we consider spam to be theft of service. Internet users do not pay their access fees for the purpose of being annoyed. None of us bought our computers or modems for the use of so-called advertisers. Since the original ARPAnet the written rules of the Internet community (see the Netiquette RFCs and their precursors from Usenet) have required that we each refrain from intentionally annoying other Internet citizens.

Culture of Openness

Internet technology is notably lacking in the kind of harsh, prescriptive, contractual, authorization based access controls which have been found in virtually all pre-Internet proprietary protocol suites. One assumption is that any host on the network should be allowed to send mail to any other host on the network, since mail will only be sent if it is expected to be of direct and equal benefit to the sender and recipient. Another assumption built into Internet's protocols is that mail should always be relayed if it is not on its final host, since this condition is not supposed to occur without the permission of the relay's operator.

Lying Conmen

Spammers, as with all confidence men, are experts in public relations. They would have us believe lies such as ``most Internet users are glad to receive unsolicited mass e-mail'' and ``the anti-spam community are a small number of reactionary hippies who are just anti-commerce.'' To some extent these lies succeed, since many Internet newcomers who were not here before the advent of spam believe that the Internet has always been this way. In fact, the anti-spam community is made up of users and technologists of all political backgrounds, all ages, and all levels of principle. There are a number of web pages which dispel the common lies of spammers, and you owe it to yourself to take a look at them. Additionally, we've archived an example.

Rights to Passage

No Internet user has any fundamental right to send you e-mail or any other kind of traffic. All information exchange on the Internet is consensual, and unless you opt into some advertising feed, the automatic presumption on the part of all Internet users is that you would be annoyed by e-mail which promotes a unilateral cause (such as making money for the sender). 

Commerce is Good

Commerce has fueled the wonderful growth of the open data services market (which is presently known by the brand name: ``Internet''). We like commerce. We don't like theft of service. It makes no difference to us whether spam is of a commercial nature; we regularly receive spam concerning the death of society mavens, or concerning our possibly immortal souls, or concerning the postcard-oriented last wish of a boy dying of cancer in Florida. It's all theft of service, no matter what its content. It serves the sender and was unsolicited by the recipient. Consensually commercial activities are good. Unsolicited mass e-mail is always theft of service no matter what its topic.

Censorship and Free Speech

The right to free speech, in places which recognize it, means the right to print leaflets, stand on street corners, and offer to give them to passers by. Just as there can be no right to shout fire! in a crowded movie theatre, there is and can be no right to use someone else's printing press and delivery trucks to send your message to people who have not asked to see it. 

An electronic mailbox which is jammed to overflowing with spam may not even have room for desirable, consensual communications, but even if there are no resource constraints on a mailbox, the ability of the average Internet citizen to sift through mountains of spam, after paying to receive it is limited. How free is speech between two consenting parties if thousands of third parties are deliberately shouting messages at the first two?

As for censorship, we have heard the accusation many times but have failed to understand it each time. We don't care what two consenting people say in the privacy of their own channel. We don't care if people want to send each other traffic we consider boring (such as pornography or football scores). What we are trying to prevent is our paying, in money and resources and our own time, to receive and process, or relay, traffic which is nonconsensual in nature. We do not accept unsolicited mass e-mail, regardless of its subject matter.

Historical Context of Spam

One of the most famous spammers at the moment was in a past life the primary cause of the United States' Anti-junk-fax law. As a professional con man, he and others like him search perpetually for new ways to transfer the costs of their activities onto other people. Advertising, when done well, is expensive, and if it succeeds it is because it actually does offer some kind of value to the people who respond to it. Spam is another in a long line of methods of transferring advertising costs to recipients. Most of us get a lot of junk paper mail every day, and most of us throw most of it away without outrage. But what if it arrived with postage due, and with no way to refuse delivery or refuse payment? If you can envision that, then you are well on your way to understanding why we do in fact experience outrage when we receive unsolicited mass e-mail, i.e., spam.

The number one most popular product to advertise via spam is: tools and data for the purpose of sending more spam. Number two is 1-900 phone sex and web pages of supposed schoolgirls doing things which are usually illegal for schoolgirls to do. Number three is pyramid schemes. Number four is the whole field of hair restoration creams, behavior modification plans to make one more attractive to the appropriately-sexed partners, life extension drugs, and anything else for which a traditional advertising campaign would be inappropriate and unsuccessful.

The products advertised by spam would be merely another darkly humorous silent commentary on the sad state of human nature -- if we as recipients were not underwriting the costs of its transmission, processing, and storage.

Legality of Spam

Eventually, various governments will enact various laws which will make the sending of spam less commercially appealing, and like junk fax, it will fade away into background noise. Until then we as recipients of spam have to decide whether to spend whatever amount of effort and money it takes to receive and delete known-to-be-unwanted e-mail, or to spend some other amount of effort and money to try to prevent its reception. 

So-called remove lists

One common lie told by spammers is that they will in fact stop spamming anyone who asks by means of their insipid remove@domainname addresses. What they do is collect all the addresses of people who send to these so-called remove lists and make the collection available to their spammer customers with (wink, wink) instructions that these addresses ought not receive mass e-mail. What their customers do is add rather than remove these addresses. Removal is hard. Addition is easy.

You can try the same experiment we did. Create a new e-mail address. Do not advertise its existence in any way: never send mail from it, never post news from it, do not add it to any mailing lists, do not use it in any mailto: links. When you're sure it's working, post it to a so-called remove list. Stand back and watch the spam pile up.