We are just showing respect for a different group of people. Forget bandwidth hogging. It's not relevant here. Forget content - if webmasters want to foul this up, it's a marketing mistake, not a netiquette error. Respect for the reader is not a non-issue.
People read meaning into just about everything.
Just because you want to draw a line in the sand and call it design, doesn't mean that people won't take it personally. People get upset when their precious time is wasted, just as you might get upset when you arrive at an 8am meeting to find the other party answering email for 20 minutes before attending to you. I am personally opposed to the concept that computers should not be refered to in personal terms because unfortunatly we often loose sight of the fact that the person on the other end of our network line IS a person and we tend to treat them with the same lack of concern that we give to the computer itself. So, yes, I take on board all of Mary's comments - and they are a neat distillation of what to do and not do when creating a Web site. This is a fake email address.