How Much Does Spam Cost You?
from the let's-get-some-facts dept
Anti-spammers say spam is costly. Spammers (and their supporters) say that's a lie: the only costs are people hitting delete. From my standpoint, this ignores the annoyance factor of having to sort through all that crap to find my legitimate mail, and to be bugged constantly with offers I certainly have no interest in. The usual reply from anti-spammers is that there are huge infrastructure costs - but now a spam supporter is raising questions about that as well, and an anti-spammer doesn't have the facts. InternetWeek's senior editor, Mitch Wagner is asking people to send him real examples of how spam is costly - specifically from the enterprise level. Hopefully, some readers here can help him out.
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No Subject Given
You can't say there is no cost.
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I see tons of it too.
Another 3-5% have some javascript that was only tested for Windows enviroments and/or Explorer browsers. I don't use either except for testing. The crappy scripting often locks up my browser or crashes my machine. The reboot time is lost productivity.
HR services weasels like Jobwarehouse or Americanjobs are the worst about this, closely followed by construction/remodelers who apparently see part of the phrase information architect on my website and assume I am somehow interested in construction topics.
The problem is definitely growing worse. For fly-by-night operations or general interest products like credit cards, why bother targeting when you can reach everyone of only fractions of a cent? How many toner replacement ads do I need to see every day before my requirements are saturated? If I responded to 1/100th of the penis enlargement offers I get, it would quickly weigh more than I do.
Since there is no master "leave me the fuck alone" list to opt-out of, when a list is resold to a new company I have to opt-out all over again. I know this goes on because I'm beginning to see botched and mutated addresses that never existed at all in the real world ebb and flow as one vendor decides a list is stale and sells/trades it to another.
Too often there is no legit unsubscribe option at all. If you are a full time spamming service, this week's HGH, opt-outs, add build next week's cable descrambler list out of the known live addresses from accumlated unsubscribes.
Everybody on the internet has something to sell. If "just delete it" becomes the legit standard I will have to switch to some sort of white list only or I will be buried as more and more businesses attempt to address what they decide are my latent needs.
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spam costs
"What? Only 50 cents!!! That's NOTHING!!" says scum sucking spammer...
Well tell ya what...add it up.
50 cents for each and every day of the year (since I check my personal mail daily) comes out to $182.50 ...that's almost TWO F**K*N HUNDRED BUCKS that *I* HAVE to pay because those *SSH*LES want to peddle their crap in my mail box.
The amount may not be astronomical, but WHY should *I*? be forced to pay for something I don't want? Even if it was less than a penny per day its still too much.
Why can't people understand that?
I didn't even factor in the cost in bandwidth (I have a 6Gig download limit...but conceivably, spam DOES take up some of that...so its eating up something that's limited...even a little is too much.)
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Cost of SPAM? Funny you should ask...
So, cost to me? A fair amount of time and of course the cost of the wireless data. The cost for wireless carriers who are desperate to get their users to take advantage of GPRS and wireless data has the potential to be considerable as well.
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No Subject Given
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Spam Assasin
Phillip.
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SPAM
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Re: SPAM
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