At 10:40 AM -0700 5/30/03, Peter Deutsch wrote:
Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:
...
So far on this thread, we have heard from none of the "large-scale
mail carriers", although we have heard that the spam problem is
costing them millions of dollars a year. That should be a clue to the
IETF list. If there is a problem that is affecting a company to the
tune of millions of dollars a year, and that company thinks that the
problem could be solved, they would spend that much money to solve
it. Please note that they aren't.
Well, perhaps it's more accurate to say "if they thought it could be
solved by working with all those nice and entusiastic folks on the IETF
general discussion list"... ;-)
We disagree here. For the millions of dollars that they are losing,
they would come up with the solution with the IETF or not. They
haven't.
> I have spoken to some of these heavily-affected companies (instead of
just hypothesizing about them). Their answers were all the same: they
don't believe the problem is solvable for the amount of money that
they are losing. They would love to solve the spam problem: not only
would doing so save them money, it would get them new income. Some
estimate this potential income to be hundreds of millions of dollars
a year, much more than they are losing on spam. But they believe that
the overhead of the needed trust system, and the cost of losing mail
that didn't go through the trust system, is simply too high.
You might disagree with them, and based on that disagreement you
might write a protocol. But don't do so saying "the big carriers will
want this" without much more concrete evidence as to their desires.
Paul, are you aware of any concrete numbers here?
Yes.
I've looked through
the IMC site, but the only references to cost seem to be in a report
from the late 90's, with no hard data. If not, this might be something
the IMC could consider pulling together? I'd agree that there's way too
much hand-waving going on here on this point...
All my discussions were not for attribution. Large mail carriers
don't want their competitors to know how many users they actually
have (as compared to the highly inflated numbers that various
analysts say they have), and they certainly don't want their
competitors knowing how much they are spending on dealing with spam.
"Our company spends more per user on fighting spam than
OtherBigCarrier!"
In aggregate, then numbers were in the tens of millions of dollars
US, and that was more than two years ago. I would be shocked if the
numbers were much lower now, given the greatly increasing amount of
spam and the level-or-increasing number of customers.
Again, the summary is that these folks are hurting badly enough to
throw highly-qualified full-time staff on the problem, and they don't
believe any of the solutions that have been presented so far will
save them enough money. If they thought differently, they would have
deployed them by now so that they could save those millions of
dollars.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium