E-mail was one of the first internet services (after FTP and Telnet) and the pioneer of the contract in many ways. The commercial e-mail services, as I have pointed out, all charged the sender (and often the recipient as well) per E-mail. World-changing ideas like the mailing list were created because the internet didn't work that way. There are many valued internet services that would vanish or be impeded with sender-pays e-mail. Yes, the spammers are abusing the cost contract, you don't have to keep pointing that out to me. But I don't know many more ways to say this -- that bad guys are abusing a freedom is not sufficient grounds to abandon the freedom. You hunt hard, very very hard, for other ways to stop the bad guys.

You might understand Gilmore a bit in this context. A number of facets of email, including roaming, were made easy and possible by the fact that mail servers would happily relay mail for any who needed it. Spammers abused that. Many reacted by working to shut down the relays, including blacklisting innocent relay owner victims. A lot of people get very upset at the idea of punishing the victim. It makes people like John Gilmore stick to their guns. At this point people have even forgotten that the relay operators were spammer victims, and now think of them as almost as evil. He changed his relay to be open, but limit volume, another way to deal with spammer abuse, but the blacklisters couldn't deal with that, and people got even more polarized.

It's not blackmail, which requires malice, but it creates the same bad incentive structure. AOL's spam filters are obviously scaring mailers enough to pay fat fees to Goodmail. That's not a conspiracy on AOL's part, but once they start getting kickbacks of Goodmail fees, what are the incentives on their part to do a better job, to get rid of the false positives that are scaring the mailers, to improve the whitelist system? Even the most honest people won't do quite as well when the money flows that way.

And it's not a tax, but it's part of a class of artificial-cost spam solutions which have included real taxes and thus as a class get that designation.

However, as for your opposition to the EFF's anti-spam positions, they remain valid. The EFF is a free speech organization first and foremost. It should not surprise you that in examining the choice between anti-spam techniques that preserve free speech and open email values and those that don't, we pick the free speech side every time. You've misinterpreted that as being a pro-spam (or simply an insufficiently anti-spam) view not because the EFF is soft on spam, but because too many in the anti-spam community have been lazy, and gravitated to "easy" solutions with negative free speech consequences.

Many in the anti-spam community happily advance ideas we could never support. They think we should live in a world where you can't communicate with somebody without their advance permission. A world where traffic is theft if it violates your right not to be annoyed. A world where it's OK to punish the innocent in order to get at the guilty. A world where vigilence committees, without proper checks and balances and systems of appeal, decide who can communicate with whom. A world where dropping email on the floor with no diagnostic to the people who care is acceptable software engineering. A world where not delivering valid mail is just the price you have to pay to block the most spam. A world where the government should regulate email, even individual states in spite of email's lack of geography. I could go on.

I'm not saying you personally hold any of these beliefs, but many in the anti-spam world do, and they are anathema to the EFF mission, and thus we've found ourselves disagreeing with some in this area.