26 said yes.
Here are some excerpts from your
mail...
Mike Hedblom
No! I receive about 10 SPAM a day at my work
e-mail address. In addition to the 80+ valid
messages that I have to process, the SPAM wastes
my, and my company's time.
Further, to forge a header is unetchical and
goes against the honor system that has run the
net for the last 25 years.
These SPAMmers cry that it is there first
amendment right to say what ever they want, and
then they lie and say that they are someone
else. May their hard disks seek forever.
Bill Paterson
Spammers contend the opposite of the
statement above. Their arguments neglect the
classic model of "the tragegy of the commons"
whereby a public goood, the commons, is made
unavailable to society at large. The use of a
150 db bullhorn to spread either political or
commercial messages in a shopping center would
entirely suppress all speech by individuals in
that shopping center -- political, commercial,
and personal. Spam is the 150 db bullhorn in my
e-mail box. It fills my allotted diskspace and
consumes my time, thus interfering with my own
political, commercial and political speech.
Janie Pederson
It makes me use my energy to hit the delete
key. I have enough to do as it is. I treat my
junk my the same way, I put it in the recycle
bin and have it hauled off. I have more
sympathy with snail junk mail, because its funds
the post office and keeps the price of my stamp
down.
Larry Tagrin
Unsolicited email should not be allowed
because it places the burden of managing the
unwanted inflow on the consumer who received no
benefits, instead of the marketer. This is
consistant with how many businesses try to
transfer costs to society while retaining
earnings for themselves. I have come to
believe that the only equitable way to solve the
problem is to have electronic postage, with the
sender paying for each message sent and the
receiver getting some of that postage as a
credit to his or her own postage account. The
accounts could be maintained by the USPS for a
small percentage off the top.
Cynthia Otis Charlton
I don't like it in my mail
I don't like it on my fax
I don't like junk mail PERIOD unless I ask for
it.
I hope (and encourage) the legislation to go
through. (And you thought this was going to be
poetic...)
Douglas Itkin
Why not get advertisements? We see it in
newspapers and hear it on the radio (except NPR
unless those long sponsor credits are considered
advertising), so why not on the internet. It's
very simple for someone to filter your email
into folders and then just trash what you don't
want. For example in Eudora go to Filters and
transfer all incoming email that doesn't contain
your actual address into a junk mail folder,
since most of the real junk mail is sent to
generic addresses.
Obviously someone is replying to the get rich
quick by sending junk email pyramid schemes, so
they keeping coming. If someone could arrest
the pyramid scheme senders and just leave the
legitimate pr announcements alone it would be
fine with me.
Frederick Rich
Yes: Like junk mail from the post office, I
might not want 99 of 100 junk mail items but I
might want that 100th item but I did not know I
wanted it until it arrived. Of course, I never
get 100 paper junk mail items in one day but I
might get 100 e-mail junk mail items becuase of
the low cost for the sender. Thus I do see a
need to keep the volume to a tolerable level.
Robert L. Berry
Why should e-mail be any different from snail
mail? There should, however, be a place where
people can sign up to block certain types of
e-mail that could be used by bulk mail senders.
This would be the equivalent being able to go to
the post office and define what you consider to
be "obscene" and not have it delivered to you.
Why is it that everyone is all up in arms
about the Internet and e-mail being so different
when most of the things done there have been
done in other ways for years, if not millennia?
I'd be willing to bet that when telephones first
found widespread use, somebody got excited
because someone use that telephone to make an
illicit date with similar to the recent case on
the Internet.
Joseph Coen
I don't see how we can totally prohibit even
spam in a free society. I do think that we
should be able to regulate it, much as mail is
regulated. after all there is such thing as
mail fraud. why not e-mail fraud.
Thanks to all of you who took
the time to write in!
