> There is no cost to spam. It is purely an annoyance factor. There is no cost to spam? Ha. Wakeup!!!! Here are two real cases that effect me directly. I pay for my service per volume (per octet). Therefore it costs me real $$$$ to receive spam. Secondaly, the other day I received 4 spam SMS messages. Never mind the annoyance of having to get the warning, open the phone, navigate through the messages, and delete them. When I got my wireless bill, I was pleasantly rewarded by a charge of 10 cents for each SMS message!!!! > -----Original Message----- > From: Dean Anderson [mailto:dean@av8.com] > Sent: May 26, 2003 3:08 PM > To: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu > Cc: Anthony Atkielski; IETF Discussion > Subject: Re: spam > > > > > On Mon, 26 May 2003 Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote: > > > On Mon, 26 May 2003 08:56:43 +0200, Anthony Atkielski > > <anthony@atkielski.com> said: > > > > > 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. > > > > Note that visiting the restroom gets a LOT more expensive > if you have > > to remodel the restroom and add more stalls because > everybody is doing > > it all the time. > > > > Similarly, if your *LAST* mail server was a Sun E6500 and 4 > Mirapoint > > boxes and various other small things like a load balancer, it's > > expensive to upgrade to a new box just so all your users can spend > > money hitting delete... Also, remember that although 20 pieces of > > spam a day is only a 5% increase in in my mail volume, I clear my > > stuff off the server on a regular basis. For the user who gets 5-6 > > pieces of mail a day and only checks once a week, that's a > *big* jump > > in how much disk space they consume. > > This is a pretty bogus argument. One that really annoys the > radical anti-spammers to debunk, but that can't be avoided. > Its sort of a sacred cow with them, but it is a trivial and > weak claim. It was made in 1998, and trounced by the DMA > then. Everything (disks, network, computers) is cheaper now. > What wasn't a convincing argument then is even less so now. > > Consider a small ISP that handles 400,000 messages per day, > with an average message size of 5000 bytes. My real average > message size is smaller, but 5000 makes the math easier. Lets > do the math: > > 400,000 * 5000 = 2,000,000,000 (2 gig per day, if you were > going to save it all). > > I notice that you can get 250Gig disks now for under $400. 2 > Disks make 1 500Meg volume. Apply a raid controller with 2 > more disks, and we are talking about $2000 in disks. ($2000 > is kind of inflated really, but some ISPs like Av8 consider > mail to be important). > > On that 500Gig volume, we can store 500/2 days worth of > email. My calculator says that we can _keep_ all email back > for 250 days. About 8 months. And it only cost us $2000 in > disk. And thats if no one deleted anything. Clearly, most > email isn't stored that long. > > People talk about Sun 6500s, and users who only read mail > once per week, but they are still able to offer mailboxes for > $1 or $2/mo per user, and aren't losing money. No one is > complaining about the high cost of email boxes. > > There is no cost to spam. It is purely an annoyance factor. > > As far as time spent hitting delete, I went through 409 spams > today, and a number of non-spam emails (hundreds, including > IETF mail). It took me less than 15 minutes to hand filter > all my mail using only pine. And thats not a daily total, > thats after not reading email over the weekend. Using a spam > filter would make this almost nothing, as well. > > If you want to count cost of advertising on your time, then > you have to count the value of the time you spend in front of > the tv watching ads, listening to them on the radio, and the > time in the movie theater watching ads, too. The cost of > accidents caused by people reading billboards. Spam still > comes out to be trivial by comparison. > > As for the volume of spam affecting network utilization, this > is also a non-expense. All email, non-spam included, makes up > a dwindling proportion of network traffic, in comparision to > gifs, and streaming media, and other emerging high bandwidth > applications. Network-wise, spam takes up almost nothing. > And like disk costs, network costs, and proportion of > bandwidth consumed is dwindling. > > Lets focus on real problems, not sacred cows. Promoting bogus > claims doesn't solve anything, but simply discredits those > making them. This isn't worthy of the IETF. > > --Dean > > Looking to offer a managed WLAN Service? Download our market report, completed by Telechoice Market Analyst group, to learn more. <a href="http://www.bridgewatersystems.com/learnmore";>http://www.bridgewatersystems.com/learnmore</a>