You may pay a fixed price for "unlimited" service, but that doesn't mean your ISP's costs are limited. In fact, the question of cost highlights the flawed assumptions by those who engage in junk email marketing, and those who defend it. It is not always apparent to the end user, much less the junk emailer, that there are many different places along the process of transmitting and delivering email where costs are incurred. In the Internet world, "cost" equals many different things besides money charged on a metered basis.

For example, for an Internet service provider, "cost" includes things you might not even think of, such as 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 a server is tied up processing spam, it creates a drag on all of the mail that must pass through it -- 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.

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 midsized ISPs, bandwidth costs are among one of the greatest portions of their budget and contributes to the reason why many ISPs have a tiny profit margin. Sans 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. Absorb the costs of increasing bandwidth, which may effect the types of services offered
   
3. Raise rates.
   
   

In short, the recipients are still forced to bear costs that the advertiser has avoided. For more information about costs to businesses, please refer to an article from eWeek.

According to the US Customs Service: "There is no easy formula for discovering and identifying a consumer or purveyor of child pornography. However, if you have information about or suspect this type of illegal activity, contact the U.S. Customs Service as soon as possible. Call 1-800-BE-ALERT.

The U.S. Customs Service also works closely with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to combat the proliferation of this disturbing material. You can also report suspicious activity relating to child pornography to their "Tipline" at 1-800-843-5678. In addition, the Interpol website gives an email address of "children@interpol.int" as an address to report suspected child pornography. The address accepts mail but doesn't provide any feedback on what action will be taken. Given this uncertainty, reporting it via email isn't a bad thing to do, but we would suggest people in the US contact the US Customs service first.

Canaidan Residents should review Cybertip.ca for information and help.

If every piece of spam had a tag or a label (such as "ADV:") in the subject line, it might be easier to delete, but does that save you the time and money downloading the spam in the first place? What if you make a long-distance call (as many millions of Americans do) or pay per-minute or per-kilobyte charges (as much of the world, and most users of wireless services do) to receive your email? Unfortunately, filtering on ADV doesn't save anything. This is also verified by the United States Federal Trade Commission's conclusions, that tags like ADV would materially help consumers or ISPs to block unwanted commercial e-mail or to segregate commercial e-mail from other e-mail messages.

Just filter it at the ISP level, you say? Unfortunately, the way email works, email servers have to receive an email in its entirety before it's possible to scan the message looking for ADV in the subject line. More importantly, adding such filtering capability requires additional server capacity; if you double or triple the number of server actions needed to process an email message, you increase the amount of resources consumed by that message. So as the volume of spam continues to increase, even deleting every message tagged with ADV will eventually require more and more bandwidth, more and more server capacity, and more and more money.

Which is better: No spam at all or 50 spams properly labelled for deletion? The answers to this question is why CAUCE believes that tags and labels are not a viable solution to the spam problem.

When the <DELETE> key
reimburses people for the costs incurred from transporting, storing, and
retrieving unsolicited email, then simply clicking <DELETE> might be a
viable alternative. Unfortunately, the vast majority of costs of spam are
borne by recipients, and not senders. That makes clicking <DELETE> about as
meaningful a solution as hanging up on a collect telephone call after you have
been forced to accept the charges.

It is true that many laws can't effectively reach people who are operating completely outside the country, there are two things to remember:

First, because most spam advertises goods or services offered by North American-based entities (for example, get-rich-quick schemes and quack medical remedies being sold out of someones basement), we advocate anti-spam laws in which the focus is not where the email came from but on whose behalf the spam was sent. If the law applies to the advertiser -- the entity profiting from the activity -- it doesn't matter where the spam originates.

Second, the reach of a law outside the borders of the country it is leglislated in is tenuous at best, however that fact does not negate the need for or effectiveness of laws against those breaking them localy. It can be very difficult to bring a murderer to justice if they escape abroad, but no one could seriously argue that this fact means domestic murder laws are unnecessary or irrelevant. Spam isn't comparable to murder, but if our judicial systems means anything, the same principles of justice should apply.