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.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
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 thread ]