> From: Peter Deutsch <pdeutsch@earthlink.net> > ... > despite the fact that the vast majority of folks have *not* agreed with > you, and some of us have specifically challenged (I wont be so > presumptuous as to say "refuted") your claim. That's nonsense. There have been repeated statements to the effect that doubling the size of a large mail system to deal with a doubling of spam is very expensive. That does not conflict with claims that the cost to provide mail service for a single user is low. > ... > month to run; this does not mean you can build a commercial quality file > server for under $200; And it most certainly does not mean that email > costs anyone "only $1 or $2 per month". If you think mail costs a lot more than $1 or $2 per month per user to provide, what is your specific, informed, engineering estimate without rhetorical flourishes or insults? If mail costs a lot more than $1 or $2, say ten times as much or $10 or $20/user/month, how can Hotmail and Yahoo provide free mailboxes? How can Earthlink, AOL, and others sell not ust mailboxes but also 10 or 20 times more bandwidth for "web surfing" for $10 to $20 and claim to hope to turn a profit? > If you continue to repeat this claim using such words as "roundly > troll. In either case, you will eventually provoke taunts and jears from > the audience, and we're trying very hard to raise the tone of this > place. So please, cease and desist such activity at once. > > And even if you can't master engineering math, you really should > consider learning some basic economics. If nothing else, it might be > useful to you in balancing your checkbook. That's good advice. > ... > As we say in French, "Ca c'est des horse patooties". Again, the cost of > email is not merely the cost of the physical file storage, you need to > consider the cost of your time processing it, the cost of time spent > dealing with such things as denial of service attacks, the opportunity > costs paid when folks hijack resources from their legitimate purpose and > so on. There is also a "social cost" when, ... Yes, the costs of spam are mostly in what it costs in human time. However, the fact that the human costs of spam are large do not justify your canards and other nonsense about the costs of bandwidth, CPU cycles, disk space, and even human system administrator time to deal with spam. Again, if spam costs mail providers much more than $1 or $2/month/user, then how can free providers offer mailboxes and how can you buy full Internet service including the use of modem pools or whatever for $10-$15/month? Vernon Schryver vjs@rhyolite.com