I'm going to try this one more time and then give up, I suppose. I just read through the comments to last night's posts on spam and people still don't seem to understand the issue.
1) Please, email me things you think are interesting and important. I never complain about readers who do that.
2) What I did complain about was people who put me on their rather large email lists. There are a large number of people who have an email list to which they send literally anything they happen to come across which they find interesting. This inevitably includes news articles I've already linked to, stories I've already covered, issues I've already discussed. In other words, people aren't reading the blog and thinking "gee, maybe Atrios might be interested in this subject which I see he hasn't covered yet..." Instead, they're just spamming things out several times a day without caring anything about the probably long forgotten identity of all the people they added to their list at some point. There's a big difference between sending out an important story to a blogger or even a small group of bloggers and just adding bloggers to your personal email rant lists.
3) And, no, people including other bloggers shouldn't be scared to send out the occasional mass email. But, that's very different from either engaging in the behavior described in 2) above or sending out actual spam which is promoting your business or something similar.
4) Once again, none of this should make readers or other bloggers think that I don't welcome and appreciate tips. Jerks who fill my inbox multiple times per day with their mass emailed missives and people who send things which they think I personally might be interested are two entirely separate groups of people.
5) I am not complaining about the volume of email I get. That comes with the territory. I'm complaining about the people who fill my inbox with crap described above which decreases the signal to noise ratio making it very difficult to find the good and interesting stuff people send me.
