Untreated Sewage in the Water
Living in Portland, we have terrific water. The Bull Run brings us clean water every day; and we drink bottled water to get it extra-clean.
Email is a lot like water; It’s ubiquitous. You can’t turn around without being faced with email. But it’s polluted too; we usually call it “spam” and say that it’s a price of having email at our fingertips. While every second email flows through the Internet, spinning with the tides, it’s also filled with commercials for v14gra and for new home m0rtg4g3s … It’s also filled with more nefarious crap like the Soder worm and other virii that read your inbox on your home computer and contribute to the pollution by spamming everyone on your contact list.
I believe that if your provide email service, you have an obligation to filter the inbound email as best as you can so that your own users don’t get an overflow of debris and trash, and also to filter the outbound email to make sure that your users aren’t contributing to this sludge in the ‘net. But more and more I seem to be in the minority.