What Experian, the courts and the entire direct marketing industry have failed to understand in [the Experian, Mail Abuse Prevention System settlement] (iMarketing News, Oct. 22) is that bulk unsolicited e-mail is NOT about content: It's about CONSENT, and the private-property rights of the SysAdmins who own and operate the servers and routers that make the Net work.
In essence: I don't care if an unsolicited offer I may receive is for donations to the Red Cross or an ad for the sleaziest porno site imaginable. If I didn't ask for it, in advance and with full knowledge of what it would contain, it's spam, and I will take whatever measures are needed to protect my network and my users from further incursions of such.
Until the direct marketing industry recognizes and accepts that the Internet is anything but a public resource, and that there are massive private-property rights in effect where all the Net's thousands of mail servers are concerned, we're not going to make any real progress toward controlling spam, or in providing legitimate e-mail advertising resources.
Bruce Lane, Owner, Blue Feather Technologies,
