Ahhh.... once again I find myself disagreeing with you. I work with
quite a few 'newbies' and all I hear is 'I hate this crap! Why do I
have to get this? How can I stop it?'. It's not about real world -
it is about experience. As you've pointed out, the more technically
adept are likely to respond because they know how to respond. All
too often, email spam has a munged reply-to so there is no way for
the casual user to determine how to tell the sender to 'cease and
desist'.
Here is a statement from my sister-in-law who is the absolute newbie:
I think companies like AOL have to protect us from this.
Potentially I could spend half my time sifting through mail and
I'm paying by the minute. And you know, they send them with a
name which looks so normal. I have to look just to see what it
is.
Is she conditioned in the real world about broadcast advertising as
you say? Absolutely, she's worked for some very large ad agencies
designing commercials and buying air time for them. Media buying is
her profession, if anyone should be most tolerant to spam email it
would be her. But guess what, she's not. Just yesterday, she asked
me how to reply to a spammer to complain.
> Besides, "junk" SnailMail kills trees, which can NOT be said
> for "junk" Email. It's time to "wake up and smell the Java".
Yes please do. Spam email takes resources. Bandwidth, disk space,
user connect time. At least in the case of junk mail, the cost is
covered by the sender not the receiver nor anyone else in between.
As stated before, when you're willing to cover the expenses of my
resources, I'll take the spam.
-betsy