"Skywise" wrote in message
...
[...]
What I was really trying to say is that what one person may consider
to be crap/junk/spam may be exactly what another person is looking
for.

It should be up to the end user to decide what they want or don't
want to see instead of some third party deciding based on their
own whims.

The beauty of the anti-spam movement is that is has nothing to do with
what's being advertised. A spammer could be advertising world peace, they'd
still be afoul of the anti-spam guidelines and would legitimately be
blocked.

It's true that some people over-user the term "spam". But the fact remains
that there's a time and place for everything, and advertising has a fairly
limited scope IMHO. If it's something I'm interested in, advertise to me in
an appropriate way. Until there is a standard for clearly marking
advertising and allowing me to automatically opt-out of all of it, none is
appropriate in Internet communications such as email, blogs, Usenet, etc.

To take any other stance is to render all of those communications useless,
as real, informative communications gets swamped by advertising. Up to your
email server, it already IS swamped; the only reason any of us can still use
email is because spam filtering is working reasonably well.

The only thing Larry is wrong about here is his misguided attempt to try to
get people to stop responding to spam. Not that he's incorrect about the
underlying facts, but that it's futile to even attempt to do so. Spammers,
taking advantage of Internet bandwidth paid for by everyone else, need only
the very tiniest response rate. Larry could get everyone he contacts to
stop replying, have them get everyone THEY contact to stop replying, and
have everyone those contacts contact to stop replying, and it still wouldn't
make a dent in the incentive to spam.

Pete