On 16/9/97 at 1:05 AM -0400, "Michael G. Schabert"
<mikeride@prez.buf.servtech.com> wrote:

> I'm afraid that this is not precedent. Faxes take up phone lines and paper,
> and cost money. If you're receiving your email, you're voluntarily using up
> your phone line, and a UCE is only taking up about 2 seconds of it on a
> 9600 modem. Most users are on unlimited-time accounts and don't pay for
> time online. They're available in the whole US, so there's not much need
> for pay accounts unless you have extremely small online requirements. Some
> argue that foreign countries are not so blessed. Well, as unfair as it
> sounds, that's tough, since US laws cannot be enacted to serve just foreign
> users.

UCE takes up Internet bandwidth and costs ISPs money. For example, from my
ISP's newsgroup yesterday:

"Cyberpromo launched about 300,000 emails before I was able to
bust them. The machine is flushing. It's going to be fast
outbound, and slow coming in for a bit."

This didn't end up happening as expected - mail was down in some form or
other for over 4 hours at my ISP. This time could have better been used
helping users instead of fighting spammers - who do deserve to pay for the
problems they cause.

--
Nicholas Riley ________ <mailto:nriley@cs.brandeis.edu>
<nriley@tiac.net>  <nriley@staff.feldberg.brandeis.edu>
____ <http://staff.feldberg.brandeis.edu/~nriley/> ____