On Mon, 26 May 2003 Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu wrote:
On Mon, 26 May 2003 08:56:43 +0200, Anthony Atkielski
<anthony(_at_)atkielski(_dot_)com> said:
Even at a hundred dollars an hour, the cost of deleting spam each day with
the delete key (and even at the current rate of hundreds of spam per day) is
only $2-$3 ... several times cheaper than the daily cost of visiting a
restroom.
Note that visiting the restroom gets a LOT more expensive if you have to
remodel the restroom and add more stalls because everybody is doing it all
the time.
Similarly, if your *LAST* mail server was a Sun E6500 and 4 Mirapoint boxes
and
various other small things like a load balancer, it's expensive to upgrade to
a
new box just so all your users can spend money hitting delete... Also,
remember that although 20 pieces of spam a day is only a 5% increase in
in my mail volume, I clear my stuff off the server on a regular basis.
For the user who gets 5-6 pieces of mail a day and only checks once a week,
that's a *big* jump in how much disk space they consume.
This is a pretty bogus argument. One that really annoys the radical
anti-spammers to debunk, but that can't be avoided. Its sort of a sacred
cow with them, but it is a trivial and weak claim. It was made in 1998,
and trounced by the DMA then. Everything (disks, network, computers) is
cheaper now. What wasn't a convincing argument then is even less so now.
Consider a small ISP that handles 400,000 messages per day, with an
average message size of 5000 bytes. My real average message size is
smaller, but 5000 makes the math easier. Lets do the math:
400,000 * 5000 = 2,000,000,000 (2 gig per day, if you were going to save
it all).
I notice that you can get 250Gig disks now for under $400. 2 Disks make 1
500Meg volume. Apply a raid controller with 2 more disks, and we are
talking about $2000 in disks. ($2000 is kind of inflated really, but some
ISPs like Av8 consider mail to be important).
On that 500Gig volume, we can store 500/2 days worth of email. My
calculator says that we can _keep_ all email back for 250 days. About 8
months. And it only cost us $2000 in disk. And thats if no one deleted
anything. Clearly, most email isn't stored that long.
People talk about Sun 6500s, and users who only read mail once per week,
but they are still able to offer mailboxes for $1 or $2/mo per user, and
aren't losing money. No one is complaining about the high cost of email
boxes.
There is no cost to spam. It is purely an annoyance factor.
As far as time spent hitting delete, I went through 409 spams today, and a
number of non-spam emails (hundreds, including IETF mail). It took me less
than 15 minutes to hand filter all my mail using only pine. And thats not
a daily total, thats after not reading email over the weekend. Using a
spam filter would make this almost nothing, as well.
If you want to count cost of advertising on your time, then you have to
count the value of the time you spend in front of the tv watching ads,
listening to them on the radio, and the time in the movie theater watching
ads, too. The cost of accidents caused by people reading billboards. Spam
still comes out to be trivial by comparison.
As for the volume of spam affecting network utilization, this is also a
non-expense. All email, non-spam included, makes up a dwindling proportion
of network traffic, in comparision to gifs, and streaming media, and other
emerging high bandwidth applications. Network-wise, spam takes up almost
nothing. And like disk costs, network costs, and proportion of bandwidth
consumed is dwindling.
Lets focus on real problems, not sacred cows. Promoting bogus claims
doesn't solve anything, but simply discredits those making them. This
isn't worthy of the IETF.
--Dean