After all, that's what the delete key is for and some people might want herbal Viagra, pictures of Monica, or both. Perhaps there is something to these arguments, but let me explain why I believe spam is so insidious. Much of the spam you receive is sent using stolen bandwidth. Not only do ISPs worry about filtering out incoming spam, they spend quite a bit of time and energy preventing spammers from stealing resources to send email. When spammers spew out their emails, they often cripple mail servers and slow down web access for everyone.
Spam interferes with legitimate commerce and communication.
With all the clever stealth spam in circulation, legitimate inquiries are sometimes filtered out accidentally either manually or by anti-spam software. Legitimate emails go unanswered. That's spammers collecting emails from postings in newsgroups. Every day, millions upon millions of unwanted emails must be discarded. All this effort expended to insolate us from spam and to discard spam takes a toll on our nation's productivity.