We all get junk mail at home. It's an accepted fact of life, at least
in the U.S. So why is Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) -- a/k/a
"spam" or "junk email" -- a problem?

To understand the problem of UCE, you must first understand
what is most often advertised via UCE. There are many places on
the Internet where copies of UCE are reposted by recipients and
system administrators in order to help notify the Internet
community about where UCE is originating. Surveying mailing lists
like SPAM-L@EVA.DC.LSOFT.COM and USENET newsgroups in
the news.admin.net-abuse.* hierarchy, you will see that there are
very few reputable marketers using UCE to advertise goods and
services. To the contrary, the most commonly seen UCE's
advertise:

Chain letters
Pyramid schemes (including Multilevel Marketing, or MLM)
Other "Get Rich Quick" or "Make Money Fast" (MMF) schemes
Offers of phone sex lines and ads for pornographic web sites
Offers of software for collecting e-mail addresses and
sending UCE
Offers of bulk e-mailing services for sending UCE
Stock offerings for unknown start-up corporations
Quack health products and remedies
Illegally pirated software ("Warez")

So why is this such a problem?

Cost-Shifting. Sending bulk email is amazingly cheap.
With a dialup connection and a PC, a spammer can
send hundreds of thousands of messages per hour. Sounds
great, huh? Well, it is for the spammer. However, every
person receiving the spam must help pay the costs of dealing
with it. And the costs for the recipients are much greater
than the costs of the sender.

Some junk emailers say, "Just hit the Delete key!"
Unfortunately, the problem is much bigger than the time and
effort of one person deleting a couple of emails. There are
many different places along the process of transmitting and
delivering email where costs are incurred. In the Internet
world, "time" equals many different things besides the hourly
rate that many people are still charged.

For example, for an Internet Service Provider, "time" includes
the load on the processor in their mail servers; "CPU time" is
a precious commodity and processor performance is a critical
issue for ISPs. When their CPU's are tied up processing
spam, it creates a drag on all of the mail in that queue --
wanted and unwanted alike. This is also a problem with
"filtering" schemes; filtering email consumes vast amounts of
CPU time and is the primary reason most ISPs cannot
implement it as a strategy for eliminating junk email.

The problem is also compounded by the fact that ISPs
purchase bandwidth -- their connection to the rest of the
Internet -- based on their projected usage by their
prospective user base. For most small to mid-sized ISP's,
bandwidth costs are among one of the greatest portions of
their budget and contributes to the reason why many ISP's
have a tiny profit margin. Without junk email, greater
consumption of bandwidth would normally track with
increased numbers of customers. However, when an outside
entity (e.g., the junk emailer) begins to consume an ISP's
bandwidth, the ISP has few choices: 1) let the paying
customers cope with slower internet access, 2) eat the costs
of increasing bandwidth, or 3) raise rates. In short, the
recipients are still forced to bear costs that the advertiser has
avoided.

"Time" also makes for some other interesting problems,
especially coupled with volume. Recent public comments by
AOL are a useful point of reference: of the estimated 30
million email messages each day, about 30% on average was
unsolicited commercial email. With volumes such as that, it's
a tremendous burden shifted to the ISP to process and store
that amount of data. Volumes like that may undoubtedly
contribute to many of the access, speed, and reliability
problems we've seen with lots of ISPs. Indeed, many large
ISP's have suffered major system outages as the result of
massive junk email campaigns. If huge outfits like Netcom
 and AOL can barely cope with the flood, it is no wonder that
smaller ISPs are dying under the crush of spam.

Fraud

Spammers know that in survey after survey, the
overwhelming majority (often approaching 95%) of
recipients don't want to receive their messages. As a result,
many junk emailers use tricks to get you to open their
messages. For instance, they make the mail "subject" look
like it is anything other than an advertisement.

In many cases, ISPs and consumers have set up "filters" to
help dispose of the crush of UCE. While filters often consume
more resources at the ISP, making mail delivery and web
surfing slower, they can sometimes help end-users cope a
little bit better. Spammers know this, so as they see that mail
is being blocked or filtered, the use tricks that help disguise
the origin of their messages. One of the most common tricks
is to relay their messages off the mail server of an innocent
third party. This tactic doubles the damages: both the
receiving system, and the innocent relay system are flooded
with junk email. And for any mail that gets through, often
times the flood of complaints goes back to the innocent site
because they were made to look like the origin of the spam.

Another common trick that spammers use is to forge the
headers of messages, making it appear as though the
message originated elsewhere, again providing a convenient
target.

 Waste of Others' Resources. When a spammer sends
an email message to a million people, it is carried by
numerous other systems en route to its destination, once
again shifting cost away from the originator. The carriers in
between are suddenly bearing the burden of carrying
advertisements for the spammer. The number of spams sent
out each day is truly remarkable, and each one must be
handled by other systems; there is no justification for forcing
third parties to bear the load of unsolicited advertising.

The methods employed by spammers to avoid being held
responsible for their actions are very often fraudulent and
    notortious. Numerous court cases are underway between
spammers and innocent victims who have been subjected to
such floods. Unfortunately, while major corporations can
afford to fight these cutting edge cyberlaw battles, small
"mom-and-pop" ISP's and their customers are left to suffer
the floods.

There's a long tradition in this country of making commercial
enterprises bear the costs of what they do to make money.
For example, it would be far cheaper for chemical
manufacturers to dump their waste into the rivers and
lakes... however "externalities" (as the economists call it) are
bad because they allow one person to profit at another's --
or everyone's -- expense.

The great economist Ronald Coase won a Nobel Prize talking
about exactly this kind of situation. He said that it is
particularly dangerous for the free market when an inefficient
business (one that can't bear the costs of its own activities)
 distributes its costs across a greater and greater numbers of
victims. What makes this situation so dangerous is that when
millions of people only suffer a small amount of damage, it is
often more costly for the victims to go out and hire lawyers
to recover the few bucks in damages they suffer. That
population will likely continue to bear those unnecessary and
detrimental costs unless and until their indivudual damage
becomes so great that those costs outweigh the transaction
costs of uniting and fighting back. And the spammers are
counting on that: they hope that if they steal only a tiny bit
from millions of people, very few people will bother to fight
back.

In economic terms, this is a prescription for disaster. Because
when inefficiencies are allowed to continue, the free market
no longer functions at peak efficiency. As you learn in
college Microeconomics, the "invisible hands" normally
balance the market and keep it efficient, but inefficiencies tip
everything out of balance. And in the context of the Internet,
these invisible marketplace forces aren't invisible anymore.
The inefficiencies can be seen every time you have trouble
accessing a web site, or whenever your email takes 3 hours
to travel from AOL to Prodigy, or when your ISP's server is
crashed by a flood of spam.

Email is increasingly becoming a criticalbusiness tool. In the late 1980s,
as more and more businesses began to use Fax machines, the
 marketers decided that they could Fax you their
advertisements. For anyone in a busy office in the late
1980s, you will remember the piles and piles of office supply
advertisements and business printing ads that came pouring
out of your Fax machine... making it impossible to get the
Fax that you were expecting from your East Coast office.

Spam can and will overwhelm your electronic mail box if it
isn't fought. Over time, unless the growth of UCE isn't
stopped, it will destroy the usefulness and effectiveness of
email as a communication tool.

Annoyance Factor

Your email address is not the public domain!
It is yours, you paid for it, and you should have
control over what it is used for. If you wish to receive tons
of unsolicited advertisements, you should be able to. But you
shouldn't be forced to suffer the flood unless and until you
actually request it.

But what about junk mail makes it so annoying? In part, it's
because accessing email for many people is still a bit of a
struggle. For example, try as they may, many of the major
online services are still hard to connect into. Their software
doesn't always configure very easily. After a few calls to
customer support, you finally got it installed. So, after being
away for a few days, you try to get your email. Of course,
you have to keep dialing, dialing, dialing... busy signals.
You're finally connected and you see that "You've got mail!"

But when you try to retrieve your email, the "System Is Not
Responding. Please Try Again Later." After five or ten more
minutes of this, you finally get your email to start
downloading. You were only out of town for four days; there
must be a lot of mail, because it takes you about 10 minutes
to get it all downloaded. Once you've retrieved it all, you
open it up, and what do you see? Five pornographic web site
spams, three letters from some guy named Dave Rhodes and
his cousin Christohper Erickson telling you how to make
$50,000 in a week, somebody telling you that you're too fat
and you need Pyruvate (sprinkled with Blue Green Algae),
and two offers to buy stock in a "New Startup
Company"...only the broker is a really bad speller and can't
decide whether he's selling "stock" or "stork."

Oh, and there was an email from the "Postmaster" telling you
that when you tried to "Remove" yourself from a junk email
list, the address: "Work.At.Home@noreply.org" was of
course "Unknown."

So after a half hour of delays and frustration, all you've got
to show for your efforts is a box full of spam. Is it any
wonder people are annoyed?

Ethics

Spam is based on theft of service, fraud and deceit
as well as cost shifting to the recipient. The great
preponderance of products and services marketed by UCE
are of dubious legality. Any business that depends on
stealing from its customers, preying on the innocent, and
abusing the open standards of the Internet is -- and should
be -- doomed to failure.