Didn’t condemn server side spam filtering as a concept. What they condemned was taking away user choice and awareness. And no, “we told you about it in the fine print of the TOS” doesn’t count much more than it does for spyware installs. If mail is to be blocked, it should be a user’s choice. And when mail is to be blocked, somebody that cares (the recipient or sender) must be aware of it. Admins are often tempted to deviate from these principles, because they are harder to follow than the simple path, and it’s certainly hard to be motivated when all you want is to be rid of the spam.

But the principles have values beyond spam. In the free speech world, history teaches you err on the side of protecting speech by a wide, wide margin. Because if you sit near the line — whatever your line is — you can be sure other forces will start pushing you over it.

As for “spam is not free speech” this is where we get some of the conflict. Spam, like kiddie porn, guys in megaphone trucks, Nazi parades, embarassing government secrets and Mapplethorpe photos is speech. As speech, it gets the presumption of being free, with a very hard standard required before trying to remove those freedoms. In particular because such removals are never surgical, and in a free society, you accept you’re going to take some bad in order to be sure you don’t stomp on any good. When the EFF has stood up to defend much nastier speech than spam, it hasn’t been for a love of that speech, though of course opponents will always portray it that way.

Some in the anti-spam community of course, are with us on this, and agree that spam should be treated as a bulk mail abuse problem, and the contents and purpose of the text should be orthogonal to how to stop it. Others say, “let’s ban E-mails that say one thing but not ban email sthat say another.” Some even want to ban UCE rather than UBE. What’s odd, by the way, is that even if you took the intersection of what everybody agrees should be stopped, rather than the union of all annoying mails, you would still have put your finger on 99% of spam. But it makes people so emotional they forget that.

However, this thread’s on charging for e-mail, and spam is only the trigger that got people into doing that. I still maintain that charging for e-mail is a giant step backwards, and that it will kill a lot of innovation as it becomes more common.

It hasn’t been the driver of my arguments, but I’m working on a software app, for example, that like many web applications, has a form in it which will send email on your behalf. Like most such apps, it asks you for your email address so it can send it in your name. There are a million web sites that do things like this. Most of the sender verification systems proposed would break such a tool, for example. And a trend towards pay-to-send will also break such tools if they want to be free, as most are.

That is of course because I believe the chances of this trend stopping here are extremely low, close to nada, unless we put up the big fight we’re putting up.