g'day,
Vernon Schryver wrote:
>
> > 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.
Actually I didn't say the cost "to provide mail service for a single
user is low", since I would interpret that to mean you were talking only
about the hardware cost of the mail hosting system. In fact, the line I
was responding to was:
# the cost associated with email is practically non-existant,
# and does not ever cost any user more than $1 or $2 per month,
I have been trying to make the point (albeit unsuccessfully, it seems)
that if you want to talk about "the cost associated with email" you need
to look at the "total cost of ownership" for processing email, and that
this is dominated by human costs, especially at the margins of the
network.
Maybe I should have written something like: "The cost of physical
delivery and storage are but a small part of the total cost of ownership
here." Oh, wait - I did, that was the bit you left off. ;-)
Somebody did a calculation assuming a person who bills out at $60/hour.
In fact, it's not outlandish for a consultant or other professional to
bill out at $150 to $250 an hour, which means that one hour of
spam-related lost time a year costs would you as much as $20 per month.
If that's all the time you spent processing spam, it would translate to
300 seconds of lost time a month, or 10 seconds a day for those of us
who read email every day. Adjust your constants and multiply by whatever
fudge factor suits your usage pattern, the point is that the real cost
of spam is far more than the cost of the email account and human costs
would appear to dominate the equation.
*That* is why I object to statements like "If you pay $1 per month for
email, and get 50 messages per day, then a spam costs you $0.0006666."
That's no more true that that gas at $1.61 mean your car costs you 5.3 a
mile to run (yeah, I know, somebody already pointed out my typo on that
one in a previous message... :-)
...
> 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.
Actually, others may have talked about the cost of bandwidth and CPU,
but I don't think I did. I *did* cite a real example of lost time and
effort tracking down a problem in an underfunded school as an
illustrative example, but it was not a canard ("An unfounded or false,
deliberately misleading story."). The school was St.Joseph's School,
Mountain View, Ca and I was the volunteer who donated his time in lieu
of payment. IIRC correctly, the school would bill me $10/hour for
unfulfilled volunteer requirements at the end of the school year, so I
think it fair to assign an economic value of $10/hour to this volunteer
time, even though you probably couldn't hire a good sysadmin in Mountain
for $10/hour and I certainly bill my time out at more than that for
consulting work.
So forget the staff member's time for the moment, I personally donated
volunteer time to determin why the machine was sluggish and to take some
remedial cleanup steps. I did this in lieu of a $10/hour payment which I
would otherwise have had to make and having donated my time, I therefore
didn't donate my time to do something else I could have done for the
school. Sure I did other stuff on that trip, but I have no trouble
saying that this incident cost the school about $10 in opportunity cost.
They fold it into their overhead, and get that much less stuff elsewhere
as a consequence. And I personally have no trouble assigning this
expense to the "cost of SPAM" account, since that's what it was about -
a spamer beat up a small group's server, and they lost time and money as
a consequence. Now, can that other guy please stop saying there's no
cost to spam? *That* appears to me to be a canard...
> 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?
Again (not a good sign, I suspect the frequent occurance of this word
indicates that we're all looping here..) this is not about just the cost
of providing a mail host, it's about total cost of ownership.
I give up. Michel's right, we should stop now. I'm off to get a beer and
heartily recommend everybody else do the same....
- peterd
--
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Peter Deutsch pdeutsch@gydig.com
Gydig Software
"Bungle..."
"That's an 'i', you idiot..."
"Oh, right. 'Bingle..."
- Red versus Blue...
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