On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 08:56:43AM +0200, Anthony Atkielski wrote: > Even at a hundred dollars an hour, the cost of deleting spam each day with > the delete key (and even at the current rate of hundreds of spam per day) is > only $2-$3 ... several times cheaper than the daily cost of visiting a > restroom. It's a lot more costly than time just to "hit delete". It's the time to determine whether it's spam, or something valuable, since the cost of accidentally deleting something valuable can be very, very costly indeed. It's the cost to download mail. (I'm currently travelling in Wales, and my internet access is (a) slow, and (b) expensive.) Tools like Spam Assassin help, but spammers are starting specifically writing their pitches so that they aren't picked up by spam filters. To the extent that they are successful, it takes even more valuable time. > This being so, the argument that deleting spam is expensive is hard to > support. It may be irritating, but it's not costly to delete, any more than > it is costly to throw junk postal mail in the trash while looking through > one's daily mail. Funny, when someone identified the US Postal Address of a spammer, and subscribed to vast quantities of junk postal mail, said spammer complained about how it "wasn't fair".... seems he didn't like wading through vast quantities of junk postal mail in order to find few bits of postal mail that he cared about. The really amusing thing was that he couldn't see the irony of him complaining about getting vast quantities of junk postal mail, and what he was inflicting on millions of Internet users. But then again, sociopaths have problems making connections such as these.... - Ted