Sponsor's Message

Yesterday, when I cleared my (postal) mailbox, there was nearly three times as much junk mail as there were genuine letters and bills. That, according to this story is a whole lot more than the mere 40% of your email that is spam.

It appears that yesterday, every man and his dog chose to send me their brochures, special offers newsletters and other sundry bits of promotional material.

This junk mail covered the entire range of crudely designed and printed offerings printed on poor quality pulp; to slick, professional presentations on expensive glossy paper.

But it was all unsolicited and pretty much just a nuisance.

Now the argument levied by those of us who are strongly opposed to email spam is that it's unfair because the recipient carries the burden of cost.

Well I've got to tell you that in these days where you have to pay $1.50 for a licensed rubbish bag to cart away your trash, "real" junk mail also places a cost burden on the recipient.

Plus, I reckon it also takes more time to carry real junk mail to the rubbish and deposit it than it does to hit the delete key.

Readers Say (updated irregularly) junk mail etc... - Sam Hydrogen... - Sean Spam V Junkmail... - Tim Spam spam spam... - Richard Spam... - Masonry User pays for... - Andre Re Spam... - Rus Junk Mail... - TomV Spam vs Junkmail... - Dave Have Your Say

So why are we so much more offended by junk email than we are by a few pages of paper carrying this weeks specials from The Warehouse?

Why are we prepared to jump up and down, shout, scream and wage war against spammers while we simply accept that postal junk mail is merely a fact of life?

Well apart from the fact that most of the spam Net users receive is either a scam, untargeted, or pornographic (or all of the above), I think it has more to do with privacy.

Your postal mailbox is pretty much a public place. It sits close to the road or footpath, well away from the inner sanctum that is your private dwelling.

When someone puts something in your postal mailbox, you have a chance to intercept it before it reaches your own personal space. With spam however, there's no such choice.

Yes, you can use ISP-based spam filtering to knock out most of the stuff before it reaches your PC but this isn't perfect -- some of it will still get through, and when it does it comes straight into your home, delivered directly to your PC's hard drive.

Or have I got this all wrong?

Is there some other reason that we react so differently to junk email?

Have your say

Lighten Up
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