Russ Hunt wrote: > >I was happy to see Kary's rant on anti-spam fanaticism. I used to be >one myself, till one day our local spam policeman said to me, "Well, >Russ, is it really such a big problem? Compare it to hard spam -- >junk mail -- which you actually have to pick up, take to the recycle >bin, get to the recycyler, and which pollutes the environment as it's >created and as it's destroyed. With electronic junk mail, you hit ><delete> and that's it." Not quite so simple. Junk snailmail is sent to us with postage paid by the sender. Yes, it clutters up the environment, but at least it can be recycled into something useful which may, for society, make up for the time I have to spend getting rid of it. Junk email is paid for by ME. I pay an ISP. I run power into my computer. I paid for the original mail program and all subsequent upgrades to it. I do not wish to be flooded with junk mail at MY expense. Let the sender do it at HIS. Long ago, I suggesgted that the cure for this is that every listserv set up an advertgising rate for the transmission of commercial, unsolicited traffic. The ratest should be publicly posted -- e.g. [log in to unmask] will gladly re-distributed your email solicitations at the reasonable price of $50,000 per subscriber. Your invoice and a letter from our lawyers will follow this re-distribution\. Spam is commercial. Commercialism is the way to beat it. -- Jan George Frajkor _!_ School of Journalism, Carleton Univ. --!-- 1125 Colonel By Drive | Ottawa, Ontario /^\ Canada K1S 5B6 /^\ /^\ [log in to unmask] / [log in to unmask] o: 613 520-7404 fax: 613 520-6690 h: 613 563-4534