[linux_general] RE: [ale] spam

[Jason Day]

On Sat, May 10, 2003 at 02:33:27AM -0400, Greg wrote:
> yes, the amount of money, etc might be obscene, but quite honestly, I don't
> think it is as costly as many would have you believe.  For instance, it just
> causes you and I the time it takes to push a button to get rid of it.  Total
> cost: 1 - 5 seconds.  I pay a single monthly fee for bandwidth.  Electrons

Sure, it only takes you 1 - 5 seconds to delete the 4 or 5 (or 10) spam
messages you get.  But each of those messages was sent en masse, to
thousands of recipients, of which you were only one.  Let's see, right
now I have 14 messages in my spam folder, which is 97698 bytes in size.
So that's roughly 6978 bytes per message.  So let's assume some spammer
takes $3000 from some "reputable" business to send out 100,000 messages,
each of which is 5K in size.  Spammers use this nifty software that
allows them to compose their message, then reads the 100,000 lucky
recipients from a database, and then sends the message to each of the
recipients at once.  That's 500 megabytes of data sent in a very short
period of time.  Even if we assume that the spammer is paying for this
bandwidth (which, I assure you, they are not), the lucky ISPs of each of
these recipients must handle the sudden surge of incoming data.  Now, on
its own, this particular mass mailing probably won't swamp any
particular ISP.  But this isn't the only one.  There will be thousands
more mailings, just like this one, each and every day.  And then, the
ISP gets to deal with all the complaints from their customers, who are
just sick and tired of deleting all the ads about how to enlarge their
members, or maybe they're worried about their kids seeing the explicit
porn that was sent to their email address.

> are not like water and gas - once the infrastructure is up, it is irrelevant
> whether I get 1 bit or 10 GB of data.  Unlike the mail, it does not end up

Really?  Guess I should quit spending the $40/month for my cable modem.
I can just go back to dialup, since I can transfer 10 GB of data at the
same rate as 1 bit.  That's pretty amazing.

> polluting the world or costing me $$ to hire someone to cart it off.  And I
> seriously doubt whether if spam were to disappear that there would be mass
> layoffs in the IT industry due to lost "bandwidth".

Again, *you* don't have to pay anyone, but your ISP has to hire more
admins to deal with all the wasted bandwidth.  And they have to hire
more support staff to deal with all the complaints.
> 
> Also, one cannot prevent businesses from advertising. It is *their* time,
> $$, etc that is being wasted.  I dunno, I am kind of ambivalent about it

It most certainly is *not* their time, $$, etc. that is being wasted.
Businesses pay an extremely small fraction of the total cost of mass
mailings.  That's why they are so popular.  Who cares how many hundreds
of thousands of people you piss off with one mailing campaign, when as
little as a .1% response can generate a profit?

> since I don't mess with it as much as I once did.  It's like anything else,
> unless you make the punishment person and not worth the effort it will be
> here for sometime.  Only since it is a global problem, it requires a global
> solution.

That's the only thing you've said that makes any sense.
-- 
Jason Day                                       jasonday at
http://jasonday.home.att.net                    worldnet dot att dot net
 
"Of course I'm paranoid, everyone is trying to kill me."
    -- Weyoun-6, Star Trek: Deep Space 9
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