Explanation of why UCE is a threat
Junk Email
Why is Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE), also called "spam" or "junk email", a problem?
Cost-Shifting. Sending bulk email is amazingly cheap for a spammer. But what does it cost the rest
of the internet community? Let's look at the ISP. He has to pay his connection to the Internet by the amount
of bandwith he used. If a spemmer now send thousends of mails, the ISP will have to pay for that. Also think of
the CPU time that is used up to forward the mails on the intermediate Mail-Gateways. It's immense and if the CPU is
busy prcessing spam, it has no ability to process the other mails waiting in the queue.
A recent public comment by AOL is a useful point of reference: Of the estimated 30 million
email messages each day, about 30% on average was unsolicited commercial email.
Fraud. Spammers are getting intelligent. Most spammers know that nobody really wants to read spam. The only
possibility they have left is to use tricks to get you open their messages. While a spam filter at the ISP-side is often
not much more than CPU consuming, spammers use tricks to bypass these filters. One might be to misuse a
third party server as spam source.
Waste of Others' Resources. When an email message is sent to a million people, it is carried by numerous other systems.
There is no justification for forcing third parties to bear the load of unsolicited advertising.
Same as fax. We already had a case where junk faxes were accused by court. By extension, junk email isn't very different
from junk faxes in the way it consumesr the resources of others.
Annoyance Factor. Your email address is not a public good. It's yours, you should have control over it. If you wsih to receive
tons of unsolicited advertisements, you should be able to. But if you do not wish to, you should be able to get rid of it.
Don't you get annoyed when you get SPAM? You longed for an email and what do you get? SPAM!
