Spam Reviews: Why junk email is a bad thing

• The recipient of the advertising is forced to pay the cost of the message. People pay for an email mailbox for various reasons, but not because they want to receive advertising. It costs the recipient real money in terms of extra connect-time charges, phone time charges, disk space, and lowered bandwidth. This is similar to the cost-shifting incurred with unsolicited faxed advertisements, which were made illegal in the US for that very reason.
• It costs real money. Junk email wastes recipient's valuable time, because they have to spend extra time to download the unwanted messages, and then to wade through the junk email in order to get to the email they actually want. This costs real money in terms of productive time wasted sorting, identifying, and discarding unwanted junk email.
• Junk email clogs up people's email boxes, mingling with and sometimes even preventing receipt of legitimate email. As more people conduct more business over the Net, this type of disruption can cost even more money.
• It may cause employers to pull employee internet email access, because they don't want to pay money for their employees to receive advertisements, nor for the lost productivity of their employees wasting (employer-paid) time identifying and discarding junk email. This lessens diversity of the community and hurts the Internet as a whole, and hurts the advancement of the Internet as a medium for commerce.
• It is contrary to the helpful and personal culture of the Internet The reason the Internet and interactive communication in general has become so popular is because of the personal one-to-one interaction possible with this technology. People from all over the world have helped each other with problems ranging from the technical to the intensely personal. Impersonal mass-emailings are the antithesis of the an Internet community.
• It is inappropriate and contrary to the interactive nature of the Internet medium. Junk email is barely interactive at best, and is often not interactive at all, because the sender forged a fake return address to avoid retribution. It is sender-oriented push advertising, not an interactive, recipient-centered pull of information. Junk email is based on outdated advertising model.
• It discourages people from participating in the Internet The saddest thing of all about junk email is that it subtly destroys the things that made the Internet so attractive to people in the first place.
  
  People are already withdrawing from participating in Usenet, because junk emailers collect most of their addresses from Usenet. This harms everyone who has benefited from the advice and emotional support other people have provided through Usenet. People who gave the most back to the Internet, by posting the most responses to Usenet questions, are the most likely to be abused by junk email. People who do still participate are forced to provide false addresses, making direct communication difficult or impossible.
  
  For the same reason, some people are not putting their email addresses on their Web pages anymore, making it harder to communicate feedback and opinion. In this way, junk email stifles communication, making the Web more like television: a one-way medium.
  
  People are also attempting to get their email addresses out of publicly-available directories due to junk email, just like people unlist their telephone numbers to avoid telemarketing calls. Friends who have lost contact cannot reestablish communication by email.