Comments on: Who owns your e-mail address?

Standpipe Studios CEO Mark Phillips says the implications of increasing rates of spam pose a threat to the continued use of e-mail.

And the same goes for "Postal Spam" as well...

A well written piece, Mark ; you make a number of good points. I feel that some of the same arguments apply to "Junk Mail" as well.
As someone who pays for their garbage pickup service - I've tried unsuccessfully for years to get the U.S. Postal service to stop delivering
unwanted mass mailings. In this instance the property rights and the costs (of discarding junk mail) are real and known. However, since
the U.S. Postal service makes money on mass mailings, they have little incentive to make it
easy for the public to stop the deluge of
junk mail delivered to my home.

slightly off-topic...

I was thinking about your comments regarding junk-mail delivered via the mailman.

What if lots of people gathered up all their junk mail and dropped it in the nearest mailbox? "Here you are Mr USPS, you delivered it to me, I don't want it, you can have it back."

Do you think they'd get the message?

[Tania Grant]

Email address ownership

I would agree with Mark that the @whatever entity owns the email address assuming that the usage of such an address is free for the user(Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.). However, when I pay a hefty monthly fee to use my email address for business purposes, I do NOT want to be bombarded and have my inbox filled with garbage that I did not solicit. Those who use "free" email access (didn't your mother tell you that nothing is free?) should not complain that they are inundated with Spam. Those of us who pay a lot for a needed service, should not be loaded with additional "freeware" that we don't want. Since I pay dearly for my email address, I do consider it mine and expect to get appropriate protection from the server entitites. And bad stuff still gets through even though I do have all the requisite firewalls, anti-virus, and Ad-aware programs for additional financial outlays on my part.