I totally agree. There are intangible costs to spam. Consider users of devices such as Blackberries. Reception of email causes the device to wake up and generate and alert. This generates false alerts as well as drains the batteries prematurely, and therefore causes us to use the device in a different way (disabling alerts). This costs us in productivity. Most people think about email in a very traditional way, and in very traditional cost models. If you start thinking about receiving spam on a wireless device, using volume based billing then, the costs become more real. And spam becomes way more painful. > -----Original Message----- > From: Eric Rescorla [mailto:ekr@rtfm.com] > Sent: May 26, 2003 4:13 PM > To: Dean Anderson > Cc: Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu; Anthony Atkielski; IETF Discussion > Subject: Re: spam > > > Dean Anderson <dean@av8.com> writes: > > There is no cost to spam. It is purely an annoyance factor. > This strikes me as a pretty limited way to measure cost. > > To the extent to which people would be willing to pay to not > be spammed, then spam is costing them happiness (an economist > would say utility). That cost is no less real than if it were > using up their disk space. To be concrete about it, consider > the amount of money being spent on spam-suppression. That's a > direct cost imposed by spam. > > -Ekr > > -- > [Eric Rescorla ekr@rtfm.com] > Web Log: http://www.rtfm.com/movabletype > > 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>