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Re: spam

2003-05-26 16:00:28
On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 08:56:43AM +0200, Anthony Atkielski wrote:
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.

It's a lot more costly than time just to "hit delete".  It's the time
to determine whether it's spam, or something valuable, since the cost
of accidentally deleting something valuable can be very, very costly
indeed.  It's the cost to download mail.  (I'm currently travelling in
Wales, and my internet access is (a) slow, and (b) expensive.)

Tools like Spam Assassin help, but spammers are starting specifically
writing their pitches so that they aren't picked up by spam filters.
To the extent that they are successful, it takes even more valuable
time.

This being so, the argument that deleting spam is expensive is hard to
support.  It may be irritating, but it's not costly to delete, any more than
it is costly to throw junk postal mail in the trash while looking through
one's daily mail.

Funny, when someone identified the US Postal Address of a spammer, and
subscribed to vast quantities of junk postal mail, said spammer
complained about how it "wasn't fair".... seems he didn't like wading
through vast quantities of junk postal mail in order to find few bits
of postal mail that he cared about.  The really amusing thing was that
he couldn't see the irony of him complaining about getting vast
quantities of junk postal mail, and what he was inflicting on millions
of Internet users.  But then again, sociopaths have problems making
connections such as these....

                                                - Ted



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