I think this is just what we need. If you encounter any problems with your service over the next few months, please don't just chalk it up to our acquisitions. They should not hurt your service at all. It is a big problem for the Internet, and getting bigger. Spam is sort of like junk mail, except that from the point of view of the sender it is practically free.
Spammers can send millions of email messages at very little expense.
Spam is also worse than junk mail because the subject matter of spam is often offensive - get rich quick scams and pornography solicitations abound. Fighting spam is a big job at MindSpring. First, we believe that as a responsible network provider we have an obligation to prevent our customers from using their MindSpring connection to send spam. This is a labor intensive task, requiring a full time staff of system administrators devoted to this purpose. Some customers really don't understand what kind of email is OK to send and what is not, and we don't want to be too heavy handed with them as we explain the issue to them.