So, don't be coy, tell us: what _does_ it cost to transport an email
- let's be generous and say a hundred-kilobyte email - from point A
to point B?
Why would you only want to include transportation/bandwidth costs?
Because we were discussing the transportation costs of email as
compared to its other costs. The quote from chromi in the message of
yours that I replied to is "By contrast, the transportation costs of
e-mail are practically nil.".
Anyhow, what's your point, I seem to have completely lost that,
That the transportation costs of email are practically nil, as compared
to its other costs (storage, human time, etc).
Thus, all spammers are criminals.
You have not demonstrated this.
Is your point that you doubt that, e.g., hijacking PCs via use of
viruses/trojans and using them for personal gain (spamming) isn't
criminal?
No. Only that your arguments did not support the conclusion you
(apparently) marshaled them to support. It's not that I doubt the
conclusion (while it's inevitably jurisdiction-specific, I think it's
probably true in most relevant jurisdictions); I'm just calling you on
your invalid argument technique.
My point is that spammers' economics are such that they could not be
the problem they are without mass unauthorized utilization of others'
resources,
Yes (most notably the recipients' inboxes and eyeball time).
such as the current favorite mode of using hijacked zombie PCs by the
thousands.
"such as", perhaps. But you appeared to be arguing that the spammers
needed to use the zombie armies for economic reasons, which I think is
false - I think they do it to avoid widespread IP-based blocking.
I'm not going to try to argue that point here; I argued it in my
previous message, and nothing you said disputed it either the arguments
or the conclusion as far as I could see.
It's relevant here because antispam techniques that are grounded in
things such as the assumption that spammers are using zombies for
economic reasons will (probably) fail because their underlying
assumptions are invalid.
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