I totally agree. There are intangible costs to spam. Consider users of
devices such as Blackberries. Reception of email causes the device to wake
up and generate and alert.
This generates false alerts as well as drains the batteries prematurely, and
therefore causes us to use the device in a different way (disabling alerts).
This costs us in productivity.
Most people think about email in a very traditional way, and in very
traditional cost models. If you start thinking about receiving spam on a
wireless device, using volume based billing then, the costs become more
real. And spam becomes way more painful.
-----Original Message-----
From: Eric Rescorla [mailto:ekr(_at_)rtfm(_dot_)com]
Sent: May 26, 2003 4:13 PM
To: Dean Anderson
Cc: Valdis(_dot_)Kletnieks(_at_)vt(_dot_)edu; Anthony Atkielski; IETF
Discussion
Subject: Re: spam
Dean Anderson <dean(_at_)av8(_dot_)com> writes:
There is no cost to spam. It is purely an annoyance factor.
This strikes me as a pretty limited way to measure cost.
To the extent to which people would be willing to pay to not
be spammed, then spam is costing them happiness (an economist
would say utility). That cost is no less real than if it were
using up their disk space. To be concrete about it, consider
the amount of money being spent on spam-suppression. That's a
direct cost imposed by spam.
-Ekr
--
[Eric Rescorla ekr(_at_)rtfm(_dot_)com]
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