I have never experienced that. 90% of spam comes from posting to the news groups on usenet. It amounts to maybe 4 or 5 incoming posts per day. This can be divided into porn, chain letters, nigerian letters, a very few trading systems, and perhaps 5% real-product marketing which are mostly computer hardware offers. That is not a huge amount to delete, and they are really easy to recognize. It takes only a few seconds. I get about 50 incoming posts from company news announcements alone, which I read anyway. Most of that is deleteable and it does not take me that much time. Perhaps 1.5 hours per day read, analyse, delete or keep.
Even when I ran the newsletter, which had an outgoing list of 1000 people, I received no more than 30 to 50 emails a day. I also posted on Usenet and other bulletin boards. My email address was maximally exposed to spam. I did not get that much I could not handle. I know most other people are just looking for a perfect world to live in. Complaints won't find it.
Only ten of the incoming emails I got required reply and mostly I could deal with that in two lines.
80% of spam now has remove facilities, which are quick to implement. This has become a law. Other than the nuisance factor, and the theoretical factor of geometric expansion of spam, it is not practically much to deal with by the real numbers. It is self-limiting to the spammer, as the usefulness of spam is very low by its own return numbers. It really does not make a hell of a lot of money. Anti-spam, in short, is a religion, and not a terribly important necessity.
The Internet itself is grinding down. I don't know where it will be in ten years but it clearly does not pay that well for 90%. Yahoo and most other portals are in the red. The underlying carriers Sprint and AOL are limping severely. Chapter 11 material. ISP's while making some money are not running off to the Caymans any time soon. Internet gambling and porn are really not huge empires. Internet music and video are also rather stalled out in terms of noise you hear these days. More a news item than a download item. I know investment interest is low these days too. When I ran the letter after 1994, (I started in about 1992, before the Internet in Canada) it would grow by perhaps 40 to fifty new trials per week. Everybody wanted stocks in the bull. Now it is perhaps 20% of that, even with the Canadian resource mini bull of the past 2 years. I doubt I could get a serious free mailing list of 300 people in 6 months. The market for serious resource info is small. Ted Carter was considered the dean of Canadian newsletter writers, and had a 700 person subscription list. He made a brown shoe living. Chelekis was an absolute floozy, had bought a 30K sucker list from a company for about 150K and that is all he ever sold to. The rest was people stealing his paper. He didn't care, he was selling stock, not news.
Silicon Investor which makes the square root of zero dollars, has a seriously clouded future. I can't see a reason to post of read the crap on raging bull or stockhouse. Stockclub was functionally dead 5 years ago.
The market right now is tied to the gold price, some diamond discoveries, and some Canadian explorationist's success, mostly overseas. I predict this will have about a 4 year life and then some market cycles will kick it down. The diamonds are part of it. Kennady Lake, Victor, Snap Lake, Diavik, although not much discussed here, are multi billion dollar boosts to the junior market. It is a new era for Canada. Without this, I doubt the golds would be that much of a bang. Gold by itself is still a play, and it will go on, as gold has an upward vector.
The thing about the email list is that there are not enough people using it, not that there is too much.
I actually grew my first email list by direct email spamming. I got perhaps 10% flames. This was easy to deal with. Had a friendly ISP who I knew personally so I never had any hassle. This is not practical today as the more people use the net, the more it is dangerous to spam. Not that it gets any more hassel. Nigerian letters go on, it is just that the means are not there. The bull market being dead the interest is not there either. Spamming my old email list of opt ins gets no reaction at all today.
The real thing to deal with is where are the stocks going, and where is the internet going overall. With this in a positive motion, the amount of data to deal with a secondary issue. Either you are up to it, or not.
<font color=green>People do not believe it but the medium is the key. Internet participation depends on free time, technical computer savvy, reading ability, and finally typing ability. This post takes me ten minutes to type. For a lot of people, it would take them an hour and a half to complete.
When the input method is sped up, the lines are sped up by a factor of ten over hi-speed, the publishing methods are simplified, the generalized input-skill levels (typing or whatever) increase by a factor of 5, the media sensory involvement increases to draw in hearing as well as real time motion, then the Internet will start in to have a new life. Right now, it is heading to the bottom of the curve. The phenomonal bandwidth problem of root-driven or mass-driven publication will have to work itself out. Right now, this equation like the economic equation itself in other fields, is working itself out in practice.</font>
Everybody wants everything for free. I cannot personally pay for all these sites. This too, (cost) has to be worked out. It will work it self out, like Christmas tree lites work themselve out, over time.
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