For a new email user, spam might not seem like such a big deal. After all, it s fun to get ANY mail at first, and you can always use your delete key.
Junk email shifts the costs of advertising from the advertiser to the recipient.
With regular junk mail, an advertiser pays most of the promotional costs. True, it takes some time to weed out the junk in your mailbox, but the advertiser paid for all printing and postage fees. Those fees effectively limit the number of companies who can afford to send you junk. Without junk email, greater consumption of bandwidth increases in proportion to increased numbers of customers. In short, the recipients are forced to bear costs that the advertiser has avoided.