The Story of Spam II
According to TomPaine.com, online service subscribers pay almost $8.8 billion a year in connection fees to accomodate spam email traffic. Freelance reporter Laura Iiyama looks at the unequal balance of payment exacted by spam -- while folks cover the costs of receiving unsolicited email, the people who send it pay very little to obtain lists and broadcast emails. Iiyama also looks at how the Anti-Spamming Act of 2001 was pushed aside by the Sept. 11 events, the Direct Marketing Association's misguided support of opt-out standards in which spammers can send whatever they want to whomever they want until people on the receiving end ask them to stop -- a ploy that's often used merely to confirm the validity of email addresses -- and recent Federal Trade Commission thinking about junk email.

$8.8 billion. I used to think it was free and easy just to delete unsolicited emails. But that's big bank.