Quoting Discount Domain Name Services on Friday July 25, 2003:
| Non electronic spam! Ian what is your understanding of spam!
| Have you or your company ever been spammed due to an open proxy??(Do you
| know what that is?)  Have you ever had to pick up a $550 data bill due to
| someone finding a hole in your system due to some outage or whatever(Do you
| know what that is). This is the true meaning of spam stealing data from web
| hosting companies or ISP's. Getting a few emails that are unsolicited use
| something like spam assassin to filter out that, but stealing data (Spamming
| data) is a crime that is no different to shop lifting.

To be honest, web hosting and ISPs with holes should know better. Take a
moment to think of victims who are the forged senders of concerted
spamming campaigns.

One of my personal addresses was used, on a single day, to send what
must have been millions of spams. That day I received around 168,000
bounce messages before I set up some mail filtering to get rid of them.

Then for the next few months(!) I received countless people complaining
about how I should (a) not send spam (b) fix your domain/server to stop
spammers (c) threatened me with lawsuits, etc.

Now that address (thankfully not this one) is practically useless, by
virtue of being a From: address on so many emails, it is now on every
spammer's list and just gets inundated with tonnes of spam every day.
That is a data cost I now have to live with perpetually.

I am reasonably savvy when it comes to these things and know why this
happens, but the same thing can happen to anyone.

So yes, anyone who argues spam is the same as junk mail is wrong. Anyone
who pulls out the "spam is better than junk mail"/"just hit the delete
key and stop complaining" argument is just insane and clearly has not
had to live as a victim of spam.

kim