Jeremy wrote:
] A main complaint of email users is that they have to
] waste time every day deleting spam messages from the
] servers on which they lease their little online garden plots
] -- but such deleting is only necessary because the industry
] has its head screwed on backwards.

Yes, this makes sense. Disk space should be available infinitely, particularly in a work context. Old email is very useful data at work. This is worth the expense.

On the other hand, I never get spam at work. I haven't gotten spam at work in years. I dunno if thats because I change jobs too often, or because my work email never gets used in a context where it can become available to spammers, or because if it did, someone would set up filters.

I get spam at home. At home I don't always have infinite disk space, and old email does not seem nearly as useful. But its not so much the cleaning up disk space thats the concern. The concern is that when you have 25 - 50 spams per legitimate email, its often easy to not SEE the emails that matter. The concern is that you don't always want to reply to everything you've gotten in your inbox, but if you leave it will get buried. The problem isn't that you have to delete a couple emails. The problem is that your email account becomes unusable, "spammed out." And as your email account IS your identity on the internet, you've got to change your identity. Once that new identity is established, the spam will start to trickle in again, and over the course of a few years the process repeats itself. Its like you are permanently in the witness protection program to avoid aggressive marketing. Thats why it pisses me off. I really don't feel the same way about paper spam. Its just not as annoying, mostly because its never forced me to move.

RE: Apres Spam