The IT Costs Of Spam
from the it's-expensive dept
Over at Internet Week, Mitch Wagner asked people what the real expense of spam was, and people came through with plenty of answers. He's actually going to split the responses into three columns. The first one describes the technology costs of spam, as told by system administrators. The next time a spammer says the only "cost" is to delete the emails, point them to this column. Between additional servers to handle the traffic and commercial spam filters, it is not cheap.
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SPAM must die!
Every Friday night when I'm getting ready to shut down my PC for the weekend I clear out that folder and get it ready to start a new week fresh.
Since approx. 5:15pm last Friday, my inbox here at work has received 101 SPAM messages, of which at least 30% are obscene enough that I could be fired if I was to surf to one of those sites.
Starting last week, I began un-subscribing from legitimate e-mail newsletters that I had subscribed to. Friday morning I received a notice from Macromedia that time was running out and I should buy their latest package offering *now*. I selected un-subscribe at the bottom of the message, visited their website and clicked 'un-subscribe from all mailings' checkbox and then clicked the 'un-subscribe' button. A couple hours later I got another copy of the exact same e-mail from Macromedia. Once again I went through the routine and un-subscribed. I received 2 more copies of the -mail that day for a total of 4 copies of the exact same e-mail even after I had already unsubscribed 3 times.
SPAM is bad enough, but receiving the same message over and over from a company is just as bad, if not worse. At least most of the SPAM I get is a single message, not the same thing repeated over and over again.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]