Re: Wealthy -- A couple of points

I try very hard to stay clear of such off-topic threads as spam, but I feel obligated to step in here. First, just to clarify the comment from someone outside the U.S. who says that our government made spam legal: Spam was originally legal unless the terms of service of your ISP forbade it. The Internet has largely been an unregulated medium until recently, both in the U.S. and elsewhere. The U.S. government tried to pass a law to make spam less legal, but the law is having little effect. When a spammer puts a sentence in the e-mail saying that their text is not spam because they say so, do you believe them? They could as easily say, "This message is fully compliant with all laws against pollution, because it does not release any toxic chemicals." It may be true, but it means nothing. And it certainly doesn't imply that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) endorsed their message. Granted, the law spammers quote is practically worthless, but it wasn't this law that caused spam to be "legal." Spammers simply hide behind a weak law to give themselves a false aire of legitimacy. In any case, the U.S. has no authority to keep spammers from operating outside our borders. The best place to stop spam, IMO, is at the ISPs, not in the legal system of several hundred countries. I'm not saying our government is perfect, but we didn't create spam -- we have merely, like everyone else, failed so far to get rid of it. Second, if you are replying to a message that contains a huge glob of spam, *why* must so many people quote the entire spam in their reply? One person replied to a reply to another reply, and quoted the full text of all the replies! All this accomplishes is delivering several more copies of the spam to the list, but this time it's from *your* e-mail instead of from the spammer's. Please, trim your reply text. The first line or two of the spam, or even just the subject, would have sufficed to identify the message. Just my opinion, for what it's worth. Scott