Why is spam bad?

Why is spam bad?
Most people hate spam simply because its worthless and takes up valuable time. If you live in the United States, it is usually nothing more than an annoyance. However, there are more important issues at stake. The most important reason is that it can cost the receiver a lot of money just to open up an inbox filled with unsolicited mail. Many users in other countries pay for every single minute they are online, and not cheaply. If you, on top of that, have a slow connection it could take a long long time to download all your mail, every minute which you have to pay for. Another important argument against spam is the fact that large internet service providers have to assign people to deal with junk mail since they have a limited amount of bandwidth, which will increase your monthly ISP fee. Another issue is e-mail viruses. They are becoming more and more common and that kind of mail is definitely spam. Aside from all these arguments, there is also th fact that most spammed mails promote a fraudulent or worthless product. Since it is so cheap to send, the spammer doesn't have to worry about targeting their spam, they can just send it to hundreds of thousands of people and assume that out of those thousands there are enough people who would be interested. A common defense by American spammers is that spamming is a right according to the first amendment. However, what really is threatened isn't their freedom of speech (selling things?) but their income. And this argument must be weighed against the argument that it isn't the spammer who pays the most for his spam, but the receiver, who doesn't even want it. Visit spam.abuse.net and CAUCE to read more about this (will open in new windows).