Re: [CH] Chile spam?
Scott Peterson (scottp4@mindspring.com)
Wed, 26 Feb 2003 12:15:41 -0800
At 11:03 AM 2/26/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>I get about as upset about spam email as I do about junk mail from the
>post office- which is, not at all. In fact I'd rather get the junk email,
>because no paper is wasted that way. It takes me a fraction of a second to
>delete the digital stuff- not a huge effort on my part.
A lot of people do that. But saying that spam doesn't cost you anything is
untrue. Recently testimony about a anti-spam bill in congress put the
costs last year at about $8,000,000,000.....that's Billion and going up
almost exponentially.
There are huge costs beyond 'just hit delete'. Bandwidth to carry it,
additional mail servers to process it, additional disk space to hold it,
administrative costs, complaint desks and legal costs. AOL estimates that
at times as much as 2/3 of the mail they carry for their customers is spam.
On a recent update for their customers they said they were blocking between
20 and 30 pieces of mail a day per customer. Given that my AOL account
gets that many a day, and multiplying it by 17,000,000 members works out
that their members alone are getting almost 700,000,000 pieces of useless
mail a day!
My ISP, Earthlink estimates that two to three dollars of each month's bill
is related to email/spam costs.
Call this a lot of things, but don't call it victimless or without
cost. It's not and you're paying for it.
Mr. DeLillo may have made a mistake, but it's still a bad way to do
business because people are becoming less and less tolerant of it.
Scott Peterson
Two wrongs don't make a right,
but two Wrights made an airplane.