Everyone at USC has been getting a lot of Korean spam lately. Apparently sometime back, USC’s directory was harvested. Of course, these spammers don’t care that 99% of the people receiving these messages won’t even have the proper character set to decode this, much less be able to understand it, after all, it’s not their resources that they’re consuming. This, incidentally is why Cory is dead wrong. This current trend is untenable because spam doesn’t just cost the time of the person receiving the spam, but there are real costs involved along every single step of the way.
Ultimately I believe that the only way that will be feasible is for there to be some sort of sender-based fee, whether it be virtual, like camram, refundable micropayments, or any of a number of other ideas. Until then, things like SpamAssassin, TDMA, etc may help stem the flow, but simply aren’t viable in the long-term.