RE: spam

There is no cost to spam. It is purely an annoyance factor.


There is no cost to spam?  Ha.  Wakeup!!!!

Here are two real cases that effect me directly.  I pay for my service per
volume (per octet).  Therefore it costs me real $$$$ to receive spam.

Secondaly, the other day I received 4 spam SMS messages.  Never mind the
annoyance of having to get the warning, open the phone, navigate through the
messages, and delete them.  When I got my wireless bill, I was pleasantly
rewarded by a charge of 10 cents for each SMS message!!!!

-----Original Message-----
From: Dean Anderson [mailto:dean(_at_)av8(_dot_)com] 
Sent: May 26, 2003 3:08 PM
To: Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu
Cc: Anthony Atkielski; IETF Discussion
Subject: Re: spam 




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

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