On 4 May 2002, Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
It does not cost "very little" to recieve spam.
It costs the end-user very little to recieve spam.
At my real job (ie, not seastrom.com), we're running a very nice (but expensive) commercial product to filter this stuff, and in a given time quantum during which we processed 1.9 million messages, spam and virii accounted for about 600k (32% was the last number I saw from our stats script). It's reasonable to assume, since some unwanted messages slip through, that we're over a third of all email being UCE.
So we have a choice: pay for the (very nice but expensive) commercial product, or add forty percent to our mail spool disk farm and extra cpus and ram in the mail server farm to deal with the additional influx. In the numbers we're talking about, bandwidth costs become measurable too.
Whether we like it or not however, this is a cost of doing business now, and is a normal part of determining your cost of goods sold (at least it *should* be).
Spam is theft, plain and simple.
Spam is a reality that none of us, either alone or in concert, will ever be able to eradicate. That makes the general gnashing of teeth == tilting at windmills. Our time is probably the most expensive part of an ISPs "spam cleanups" budget - automating a filter system (for those who specifically ask for it, of course) via the purchase of services from Vixie or your favorite equivalent is likely to be a reasonably inexpensive alternative to having us spinning our wheels. <asbestos underwear in place ;->
---Rob
-- Yours, J.A. Terranson sysadmin@mfn.org If Governments really want us to behave like civilized human beings, they should give serious consideration towards setting a better example: Ruling by force, rather than consensus; the unrestrained application of unjust laws (which the victim-populations were never allowed input on in the first place); the State policy of justice only for the rich and elected; the intentional abuse and occassionally destruction of entire populations merely to distract an already apathetic and numb electorate... This type of demogoguery must surely wipe out the fascist United States as surely as it wiped out the fascist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The views expressed here are mine, and NOT those of my employers, associates, or others. Besides, if it *were* the opinion of all of those people, I doubt there would be a problem to bitch about in the first place... --------------------------------------------------------------------