Re: [Asrg] My take on e-postage

> > By contrast, the transportation costs of e-mail are practically nil.
> I can see we are now in a context-free loop.
>
> As founder and CEO of an ISP for these past ~15 years I actually
> provide e-mail systems to the general public and do the budgets etc so
> have some actual, current, knowledge about the costs.
>
> And you...?
I have a calculator and a rough idea of what a T1 line costs, plus I'm 
making some assumptions which are probably valid in the US and many 
other Western countries.
As an ISP, you're part of the recipient's end of the system, not the 
transport part.  If you were a backbone, your experience on transport 
costs would be more useful for this particular argument.
> > Spammers happily paid for phat pipes to send mail through, before
> > widespread blacklisting forced them into using zombies.  The cost is,
> > and has always been, the recipient's time spent in sifting through the
> > mess.  (I count the recipient's ISP in this as well.)
> Spammers use zombies for two major reasons:
>
> 1. IP mobility - to avoid blacklisting as you say.
>
> 2. Free resources - the economics of spamming is such that they must
> steal resources, they could never pay for what they consume, their
> service just isn't valuable enough which is why it tends to revolve
> around cheesy come-ons for mostly phony penis enlargement pills and
> similar.
>
> Point 2 is in direct contradiction to what you asserted, that they
> "happily paid for phat pipes", can you tell me what you base that
> assertion on?
I've read a couple of media interviews with spammers, back when they 
still did use their own T1 lines and servers.  The journalist could see 
all the equipment stacked up and working away.
> I'll wildly guess that for a legitimate advertiser $100,000 would be a
> very reasonable charge for sending email to 100M mailboxes, assuming
> such a thing existed. That's around 1/10th cent per piece.
>
> What do you imagine a spammer charges to send 100M pieces? $100?
> Probably around that.
Given that spammers typically work from an illegally collected list of 
addresses, that's actually quite a reasonable price.  If each spam is 
5K, 100M of them can be sent over a T1 in about an hour or two, 
ignoring bounces and retries, and assuming he's got a fast enough 
server.  He only needs four or five $100 jobs a month to break even on 
the T1 rental.  Ten, and he can live comfortably off the proceeds.
So clearly the bandwidth cost of e-mail is negligible, somewhere around 
the microcent level.  The costs to the recipient - and his ISP - are 
not.  That was my entire point.
The reason why the legit advertiser could charge so much per impression 
is that their address list must be collected and maintained far more 
carefully.  They might also get a better response rate, because they 
can target the appropriate markets and avoid causing offence.
--------------------------------------------------------------
from:     Jonathan "Chromatix" Morton
mail:     chromi(_at_)chromatix(_dot_)demon(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk
website:  http://www.chromatix.uklinux.net/
tagline:  The key to knowledge is not to rely on people to teach you it.


_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
Asrg(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg