Email Spam Vs Junk Mail in the Mailbox – Whats the Diff?
Sending postal mail costs money to the sender, both to print and to deliver, so there is a monetary threshold that keeps every company in the country from sending lots of it. That threshold ensures that, while you may receive what you think is an irritating amount of junk, your postal mailbox is not completely flooded with it.
Email, on the other hand, costs nothing to the sender therefore there is no monetary barrier or incremental cost to deter how much email spam can be sent. With this in mind, here’s the problem:
There are over 30,000,000 businesses in North America alone. If sending postal junk mail cost nothing to print or to deliver and therefore each North American business could freely send you one item of postal junk mail per month, you personally would receive 1,000,000 items of postal junk mail each day. Obviously your post mailbox would not cope even with a tiny fraction of that. Luckily, print and postal delivery costs prevent that ever occurring. But not so with junk email.
Very simply, spam does not scale. There is no way for a recipient to say “I will accept only 10 items of spam per day and no more” since there is no mechanism to force millions of junk senders to stop sending after the recipient’s daily quota has been reached. Nor is there any mechanism to force spam senders to not send more than one spam per month to each recipient. Nor is there any mechanism to limit who can send spam to your email address. The Internet is international — can only North American businesses send you spam? How about South American businesses? And European businesses? What about businesses in Asia or Africa, are they not allowed to send spam to you as well?.
If you agree to accept spam as an advertising medium, then you automatically agree that every business in the world can send spam to your email addresses. As you have no way to limit who can send you spam, you are therefore agreeing to receive bulk email advertisements from a potential 200,000,000 businesses worldwide. Assuming each only sends you one spam per month you would receive 6,600,000 spams per day… meaning 4,500 spams per minute, or 150 spams per second, into your email mailbox. Many businesses would like to send you much more than one advert per month, possibly more than one per day! So how do you solve this problem?
The obvious solution is to limit who can send bulk email advertisements to you, so that you only receive the bulk email you actually want to receive.
Instead of agreeing to receive millions of unsolicited bulk emails from millions of senders, the solution is to instead opt to receive only bulk emails from specific lists you decide and consent to subscribe to. That, is what Spamhaus advocates and works to lobby world governments to legislate.
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