by: Chris Hickman
Spam can be a lot more damaging than you might think. Obviously, they are the most annoying thing that you can receive through your inbox, but it goes deeper than that. If you are like the millions of other internet email users, you know that sending and receiving email is a free service that comes with your internet service.
Internet service providers are great for providing you with a way to send letters to your friends and family while saving you the cost of postage and envelopes. You can even send cards for free with an email address. But don't let the free service make you think that you don't actually have to pay for it. Let me explain.
Internet service providers and web hosts do not get their email services for free. They have to pay for something that we do not have to pay for as consumers. They have to pay for bandwidth. That might not mean much to you, but for these companies, it means that they are forced to produce mass emails, and this means that their costs increase as well.
It may not seem to be a matter for the mere consumer, but let me tell you that this does affect you; here is how:
Since they are forced to send mass emails, which in turn raise their costs for service, you as the receiver are forced to pay more money for you internet service. This in a way helps ISP's to reduce their overhead costs.
Some of the cheaper ISPs like Net Zero help to cut their costs down by charging outside companies money to spam and add those annoying pop-ups to your homepages. Since the advertisers are paying for their pop-ups, you get a break on the cost of using them as an ISP.
Other popular companies use affiliations to assist them with keeping their costs down, eventually leaving the consumer with a pretty good rate. I'd prefer to use an ISP that simply goes for the search engine affiliation as they have much better pop-up prevention on their side, and they actually provide you with a service.