Have you heard from Senator Mike Gravel? He's apparently very fond of me because he sends me all kinds of notes, although he never answers my letters back to him. His must be a peculiar kind of affection. It is strange that a person in such a high position is using spam to promote his cause. Or is it so strange after all?
Politics is the art of weilding the power of the mob against individuals, whether to convince them to believe something or vote a certain way, or to coerce them into supporting your organization. The exploitation of the Availability Heuristic is the foundation of advertising. It only makes sense that someone who is willing to get paid through taxation is also willing to spam people.
The bigger issue here is the minimal cost of our attention. Email has made us the unwilling suppliers of consumer attention for free (only to those willing to spam us, of course). This is a good example of the tragedy of the commons, wherein the cost of an action is simply too low to prevent the kind of damage that the action produces. The solution is responsible ownership, and I have to admit that I do not yet hold my own email accounts responsibly. Social networking sites are solving that problem for me. But since I still check my email, I still suffer from the damage that spammers do.
To responsibly own your email, you'd have to find an email provider who allowed you to arbitrarily control the cost of sending you an email. It would make sense for this service to collect a very small percentage of whatever you charge unsolicited e-mailers to send you email.
How about this? Save Your Spam!
With politicians ever looking for new laws to make themselves standout, we're bound to soon have a law that entitles the receiver of spam to financial damage awards. Establishing the identity of a spammer is very difficult if you have only the spam they sent to one email address, but if spam from several email addresses is analyzed together, it may become quite a simple matter to pinpoint the originator. Answering spam ads, at least to collect identification information is also a good idea.