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What Is The Real Cost of Spam?
securitas writes "The NY Times has a nice feature about the diverging estimates of the costs of spam (Google). The estimates vary widely from $10 billion to $87 billion per year for American workers, and even more for global costs. Critics say that research firms' estimates vastly overstate the actual cost of spam. Public institutions like Indiana University have to be sensitive to the First Amendment rights of the spammers. And at companies like Nortel Networks, security architect Chris Lewis says that the real economic burden is the 10 to 15 percent - 5,000 to 10,000 messages a day - of the spam that still gets through, which costs the company about $1 in lost productivity per message. The costs can be much higher if a top executive is upset or mad about spam. "If someone in senior management gets spammed," Mr. Lewis said, "it could take 20 or 30 hours of everyone's time, up and down the chain." A chart of the per user amount of spam and the time spent processing it, as well as the varying estimates of the per user cost of spam are included in the article."
A $1.95 a can...last time I checked
here
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Well, yes, since the CEO needs to ask his assistant to ask a senior manager to ask the Spam Control Committee to ask a freshly-hired sysadmin to fucking hit his goddamn delete key. All that and more for just $50 million a year, plus golden parachute!
...which costs the company about $1 in lost productivity per message.
Where can I find a job where I get paid $1 every time I press the delete button? I'll fax in my resume' right away!
Or has this been calculated in the same way that they calculate money lost from 'piracy' and 'hacking'?
I can certainly see how spam costs real money in terms of bandwidth and all, but I'm wondering whether they actually did some research or just guessed.
This
I don't like wading through Spam... too gooey and greasy.
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
What, you mean the employees actually click through to 'talk to girls like her' and get a dick enlargement?
Either I'm a spam processing machine, or some of these estimates are WAY overstated. After running through two filters, I end up only seeing 20 TO 40 spam's a day, and it takes me all of 20 or 30 seconds to deal with them - for the WHOLE DAY. Do these people keep their delete key in their drawer or what?
And the person quoted about the cost of setting up spam filters and following up on incorrect filtering seems to ignore the fact that the effort for this person to do this is spread across all the users... thousands of them (or tens or hundreds of thousands, in this case).
Marc
-- PGP keyID: 0x4C95994D
how do they figure $1/msg? It maybe only takes me 10 seconds to alt-tab over to outlook and see that it's spam, delete it, and alt-tab back. let's see... that amounts to $360/hr! I wish I were making that kind of money! If it weren't for all this spam...
if they'd just get spambayes they wouldn't have this problem anymore. hardly any junk mail gets past spambayes...
I don't think that figure is anywhere near the cost. I think they might be using the 'RIAA Method', by adding up the total spam sent to email addresses (even null email addresses) and putting a cost of say $0.01 on each email. To get the true cost you'd have to make a huge survey of how much spam each person gets and average out the figure, I reckon.
--
for now,we have to live with it (or with what gets through our filters).
"If someone in senior management gets spammed," Mr. Lewis said, "it could take 20 or 30 hours of everyone's time, up and down the chain."
In other words, stop whining and hit delete.
DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE
oktoo much.
The real issue about costs of spam is not what it costs today, but what it costs a year, two or 5 years from now, if it's not killed today.
The volume of spam is increasing exponentially. It will reach a point when it will start choking up Email entirely.
At that point it's too late.
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. Remember to shoot knees first, so that they can't run away while you slowly torture them to death
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Sift through hundreds, sometimes thousands of messages a day searching for legitimate technical support issues
Only accept email from addresses belonging to customers on file.
This has had a detrimental effect, and we often do get calls from customers saying their emails never got through and that they need to know which of their email addresses is on the account because they don't remember. This is inconvenient, and these measures may have led to the loss of a few customers for us. This isn't terrible, however, compared to spending hours a day sifting through spam, which would probably cost us more than the customers we lost.
This is still unacceptable.
Spam has cost me over $10,000, and my dick STILL isn't any bigger.
I wonder about the effectivity of Spam because I just chuck it all. I can't remember a single time I clicked on a spam email. Nobody I know gets any spam that's worthwhile in any regard.
I just read James Cramer's bio and he talks about how TheStreet.com did a bulk mailing that they paid $500,000 for it. End result? 5 subscribers. $100,000 per subscriber. That's a terrible conversion rate for junk mail. Now I know that was junk mail, not spam email, but I simply can't imagine the rates being all that much better for Spam.
I'd say one way to fight spam is have a "do not spam" registry ... like what's being done with telemarketers.
A good study must take into account more than the original purchase price. How much productivity is lost due to increased bathroom breaks? How much was the environment damaged by the flatulence of whatever animal (?) it was that the Spam was made from? How much does Spam consumption increase the burden on the healthcare system? If Spam is allowed to reach a corporate executive during lunch or dinner, one could easily see how 20-30 hours of subordinates' time could be spent on the problem, perhaps even resulting in someone's termination and the corresponding costs of finding a replacement.
Clearly total cost of Spam is much higher than, say, a nice serving of fish.
paintball
That reminds me, I haven't cleaned out my Hotmail account in a week!
Does spam generate enough revenue to justify it's cost, even at $Billion, or heck, even $100 million? If not, then it's time for the government to step in. It's your "1st amendment right" to tell epople to buy stock XYZ (knowing you are going to dump it next week), so why are there laws that will put you in prision if you do? The reason why there are SEC rules and such are because it hurts the economy to have people messing with the stock market.
Well, if the spammers are costing more money than they are generating then they too are hurting the economy, and rules need to be made to regulate them.
And if mail servers from other countries are messing with our economy, then that sounds a little bit like, dare I say it, Terrorism? They need an invasion, pronto!
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
That's not the fault of spam- that's the fault of whiny executives. Execs are always whining about efficiency, "making the sacrifice", cutting the fat...yet they're responsible for more productivity loss for most IT departments than other employees combined.
When 2-3 execs moved into the office I was supporting, they were a massive drain, killing my productivity- because any time even the slightest thing was wrong, we had to drop what we were doing, and rush to make the Big Baby happy.
Executives, hear this. One sure fire way to enhance the productivity of your IT staff is to learn how to use your #$!@ing email program, not complain when your desktop is the wrong color, learn how to back up your data, and don't make us run in circles on your bloody little pet projects. Don't even get me started about personal printers/fax machines.
Please help metamoderate.
Since most, if not virtually all spam is commercial in nature, it is not protected by the First Amendment. Kind of like the whiny telemarketers suing the FCC -- nobody has a "right" to try and sell me anything, thanks. And use of a recipient-pays delivery model removes them even more from the collective good graces of everyone trying to wade out from under the deluge. So screw the bogus legal pretext and lets get on with some gruesome public executions.
In other news, astrophysicists have announced that they now know what all that dark matter is: it's stupidity.
Costs of Spam..
:)
6 years to life for every M*ther F**Ker you kill
Don't Tread on OpenSource
It could be that cost is the wrong focus. Advertising the lack of benefits might deter spammers. By now most people have a knee-jerk reaction to delete the stuff before ever seeing what's in it; therefore, it stands to reason that the cost of paying someone to send ads anonymously may now outweigh the payback. Posting some hard stats on that might get organizations to send less spam, or pay spammers less money, or fire some spammers - all of which could result in less spam.
"Microsoft killed my company, I hold a personal grudge. I don't use Microsoft products and neither should you."-JWZ
"Critics say that research firms' estimates vastly overstate the actual cost of spam"
They probably use the same methods that determined that Mitnick caused $200billion in damages.
Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
Why not do both? Put your customer addresses on a whitelist to ensure they always get through to you. Then for any other address, apply a very strict spam filter of your choice. This will do the "sifting" for you. You will get some false positives, causing you to lose a couple messages, but well... if those customers want *guaranteed* service, they will put their email address on your whitelist.
Spammers do have first amendment rights, so they might have a right to send me spam. I don't understand the laws as they deal with commercial speech, so I don't know where their rights end. I just want to make sure it costs them more than it costs me. They are not in this for freedom, they are in it for money. If they have to pay more, they will spam less.
Think global, act loco
I sent out a spam offering to break the legs of spamers. The response was tremendous!
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
There's one factor regarding spam that I would think would throw these calculations way off. That being, pornographic spam.
Given that a porn spam that ends up in a minor's mailbox would be a felony, the cost of prosecuting the hundreds of thousands of cases of this would boost the "total cost" considerably, I think. And that's discounting any potential effects on the minors themselves.
As this is a crime, and the legal system should be obliged to follow through with prosecuting complaints, I think these costs should be figured into the calculations as well.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
internet bandwidth. Lots of it.
'nuff said.
"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."- Friedrich Nietzsche
A number of people have responded "But I can delete spam really fast" etc.
claiming that the costs quoted seem way to high. What they don't estimate is
the full cost within an organization of dealing with a problem like spam which
is greatly increased by a number of factors:
1. Management get annoyed by spam and see it as a drain on their team's
time and want to do something about it: that costs time there for them---
because they are thinking about spam and not making widget X---and the IT
department of the company who has to respond to the manager's questions re:
what are we doing about this problem?
2. Not all employees are as sophisticated as the Slashdot crowd (can't believe
I said that) and so for them spam is a far greater time sink (== $$$). They
start wondering why they got the spam (especially when it's pornographic) and
wonder if they did something wrong or if someone is going to "find out". While
they think about spam they are not working.
3. Spam is a workplace nuisance for the HR department because offensive material
that enters the workplace becomes the employer's problem when people go to HR
to say that the employer should "do something" about the offensive material
(after all an employer would "protect" its employees from a calendar of nude
women or a harrassing coworker). More $$ spent in the time to complain and HR
doing something about it.
4. And finally there's the IT guy who bears the brunt trying to fight the battle
against spam when he's got plenty of other stuff to do. And so he buys expensive
software to deal with the problem. More $$ spent on his time and the software and
maintaining the software.
It's just a little more complicated than "can't people just delete the stuff". Even
people who say "just get tool XYZ" overlook the cost of deploying (to 1000s of
desktop machines), training employees (to use the thing) and maintaining it. That's
a very expensive proposition.
John.
I expect lots of mod's down for overrated... come on people, dont' hold back!
But yes, execs do sometimes need handholding. Years ago, while I was still doing sysadmin, the head of one of the neighboring departments would ask me for help when his Mac wouldn't print. Hey, I was a Unix guy, not a Mac guy, though if they'd gotten me a Mac I'd have been quite happy - but 95% of the time it was a matter of rebooting the network printer frob a couple of times and it'd work....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This sounds a lot like some of the spam I get.
The cost: hours and hours of experimentation.
Wow. Marriage sure has changed you, CmdrTaco!
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Now, I'm not from the US, but isn't the first amendment freedom of expression/speech? What does that have to do with spam?
Yes, you have a right to speak. But you do not have a right to come into my house and yell at me. I have a right not to go out and hear what you say; you don't have a right to force me to hear what you say.
Isn't the first amendment then irrelevant when it comes to spam?
"But everyone should know everything." -markab
I know the group that must have performed this study, they're the same that stated that P2P networks cost the music industry $2 billion a year.
I think they used to run a few S & L's during the 80's.
My span is always free.
I never liked you
To: CEO
From: John Smith
Subject: V*I*A*G*R*A
To: CEO
From: Your Buddy
Subject: Are you feeling a little less than you could be?
Now let's take a poll. How long wold it take for most of you to figure out this is Spam? How many of you would approach the 10 second mark for deleting both of these? If you are, then you have a slow trigger finger.
Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful
just leave your name and e-mail address in a reply to this post. You'll be e-mailed with the answer within 1-2 minutes. /me runs
How much of our employer's money is wasted by employees reading & posting about spam?
If I drive fast enough at the red light, it'll appear green.
"$874 a year for every office worker with an e-mail account"....
What on earth type of number is that? I work in a small (3 person) office, a branch of the main company.... Unfortunately, this means that when someone calls us, I'll pick up the phone half the time. The time I have to waste trying to figure out is it's a telemarketer or not is insane, and it takes quite a bit of skill to represent your company with class while hanging up on these 2-bit lowlife punks.
My calculation: 3x the wasted time of spam, so telemarketers are robbing every American worker $2541 out of their paychecks, assuming that the lost time can be made up in productivity with constant market value. Makes me care far less about the "2 million" jobs that will be lost thanks to the do not call list.
Worst part? We can't sign up our phone number with the Federal do not call list. Out only hope is if my baby yak breaks out of the barn, hops on to the internet, and manages to type the phone number for our biz at donotcall.gov.... but what's the chance of that happening?
At least e-mail is fairly easy to screen out.... The random-characters these guys are inserting into the body of the message in order to avoid blacklists are very easy to spot.
HeHe. Cost of spam, two triple bypasses, and a coronary.
That's also true for ISPs - web traffic carries a lot more bits than spam, and while spam email probably outnumbers real email by byte-count as well as message count, it's not really a big deal for connectivity-provider ISPs. (Email-specialist ISPs are obviously another case entirely.) On the other hand, the worker-time cost of handling spam complaints and trying to keep filters up to date is more important than the cost of the bits.
Almost all email programs let you display the sender and subject without opening the message. 90% of the time it's pretty easy to tell just from reading those whether to delete it without opening - filters can often trash many of those messages automatically, but they can also speed up the decision time by marking suspicious messages.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Here's another estimate
.sig
Probably should double those numbers since the page is over a year old.
-- this is not a
You can't legislate your way out of the spam mess. Read this: http://www.zeropath.com/bigbiz.html for an example of how Spam legislation will backfire on us all and only end up supporting Microsoft.
Funny thing is that Viruses actually cost more than spam, yet these folks are worrying about spam.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Thanks to SpamBayes(http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/) !
Multiple messages times a few seconds? Why, that could add up to a couple of minutes per day! How dreadful!
I hate spam as much as the next person (that also hates spam), but let us look at the big picture here: How much productivity is realized by near-instant communication like e-mail? Communication that doesn't entail paying for long-distance phone charges and postage stamps? Did I miss the part in the article that talks about all the benefits of e-mail, in addition to the costs like spam? Or have we all become so spoiled by the convenience of e-mail that we've lost sight of how incredibly useful e-mail still is, even with all the spam?
END OF POST. PROCEEDING TO OBLIGATORY QUOTATION...
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I'll fax in damages. search the problem, perhaps even get paid $1 per year for a spam filters and even more for money. If it takes me it's for just $50 million a day, and more for global costs. Critics say that slips past your bloody little bit like, dare I end up a little pet projects. Saving the problems that research or 30 hours of spam are generating then suing the flatulence of them to justify it's spam first. This involves viewing the payback. Posting some hard stats on the per message. The estimates vastly overstate the costs me. In the varying estimates of it. 4. And that's $1 per minute, and to the users... thousands of spam. Those take 20 or rusty nails underneath their finger and delete.
Anybody who says otherwise is BULLSHITTING.
The first amendment talks about Freedom of speech - freedom of the press. Nowhere does it permits anyone from using someone else's press, as spamming does by using someone else's computer/network ressources.
Public institutions like Indiana University have to be sensitive to the First Amendment rights of the spammers.
First Amendment rights do not apply to spam. First, let's look at just the communication aspect of it. Spam is not directed at an individual per se, but at a list of millions of people. The fact is, though, that individuals DO receive it personally. It is in their face, staring at them from their mailbox. This is not a soapbox preacher that you can just walk away from; we are forced to deal with it on a personal level, at our own expense. The First Amendment guarantees "Free Speech", not a "forced audience".
Now, let's look at the content side of spam. It has been determined repeatedly that the First Amendment is not protection for unproven claims, scams, or lack of "truth in advertising". Companies and individuals who have parlayed these things into First Amendment cases have invariably lost.
If a person or company wishes to advertise to me, they may do so. Advertising, historically, is at the expense of the company, not the consumer.
When I get spam from an open relay, with forged headers, bad return info, and base64 encoded, exactly how much do they think I'm going to spend on their product? Exactly how seriously do they think I'll take them?
The answer is: I take them very seriously indeed. Not for any reason that they hope for, however. I CAN and WILL pursue them, catch them, and put them under the brightest light that I can find.
Because, I am a spammerhunter.
cost estimation, i.e.
1. work out the total number of spams
2. multiply by 1 hour to work out total time spent on spams
3. muliply by total value of company
4. sue spammers for this amount
5. profit
A COMPLETE BUSINESS MODEL - NO ????? STAGE !!!!
Same as in Town!
I disagree with this positive outlook on spam. Technically, Dr. Fader is right: the infrastructure grows because spam forces it to do so.
This is not productive growth to me, it's just fat. One needs more bandwidth and processing capability to manage spam. This capacity could be used for other avenues, or the money spent someplace else. This is bad economics - something along the lines of the broken window fallacy.
I do think spammers have made us think smarter about email (a good thing), but we have paid for that in many ways. There are no net gains here - at least not from my perspective.
$1 per message... hmm I wonder if that figure includes the estimated amount of time employees will spend browsing comments on an article that exists because of spam... that would certainly explain that horrendously high price. And as for spam filters in companies, the cost should be nominal since not all users would use it individually, but it would be applied to the company's entire email system. PS. I get about 2 spam messages per month...I can't begin to imagine how people recieve 2000 per day!
I mean, especially with being a web HOSTING company, where many of your clients won't even have a decent e-mail address until the buy one from you, why on earth did you bother with support via e-mail when web interfaces, even ones that have anonymous access, are so much better.
I killed many of my personal e-mail address a long time ago, with an auto-reply that leads to http://www.rahga.com/contact.... I get roughly 2 spams a month through the form from desperate spammers.
the real price of spam is around $3 per can at your local supermarket. ;)
Maybe a way to avoid any shaky first amendment issues - commercial speech already enjoys less fa privliges than personal speech.
First require all spammers to register and be licensed as a business. A nice solid license fee (not so high as to risk legal challenge, but in line with what other businesses have to pay that are licensed).
A $.05 tax PER ADDRESSEE for all unsolicited commercial email would end spam fast. $5k to send out 100k spams would put an end to it fast. (Does anyone know what rate a bulk snail-mailer has to pay per piece of junk?) And tax evasion laws have some very nasty teeth - nasty enough for all of us that wish to hear about spammers getting brutally gang-raped in prison to be quite happy.
And of couse make it a felony to attempt to hide the source of the mailing by forging headers, bogus return addresses etc.
Of course I still believe that just selling hunting tags and making it legal to hunt spammers would produce better results.
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
The argument that spam helps the economy (through the sale of anti-spam and anti-virus software) is poorly thought out. According to that logic, car thieves help the economy because the victim has to spend money on a new car. Reality is, the victim will reduce spending on other items to purchase the new car. The car dealer may love car thieves, but everyone else suffers for it.
Likewise with spam tools. If a business spends man-hours and money on anti-spam tools, that's time and money that isn't being put into more productive uses. It's a zero-sum game.
How much do these consultants that pull these figures out of thin air get paid? Someone should fund a study into the cost of urination or mosquito bites to businesses. I bet it causes more loss in productivity than hitting the delete button every once in a while.
Ask not how to get rid of spam, ask how to send your spam to SCO.
I'm pulling these numbers partly from my experience and partly from my ass.
Average user at work receives ~ 10 spam messages per day, with our spam filters catching 80%, so the user receives 2 per day.
I figure you can classify spam messages into 3 types which require varying amount of effort to determine when to delete them.
First, you have obvious spam that can be deleted by reading the subject. I figure that 25% that get though spam filters are this type. Let's say they require 5 seconds to read/delete.
Second type requires the user opening the message and reading the contents. Let's say 70% are this type and require 15 seconds.
The last type are the ones that confuse users or they think they are legit. These are the messages that users will reply to, talk to their coworkers about, or forward to IS to be verified. This would be the remaining 5% and require 5 minutes (300 seconds) of time.
With those numbers, the users spend 27 seconds per message or 54 seconds per day.
Per year, that is 5.475 hours. If the average cost of a user (pay + benefits) is $30/hour then the annual cost for spam per user is $164.25/year or $0.225/spam.
Now, we are running spam software in this situation. Figure that the spam software cost $10/user/year in licensing, and an additional $10/user/year in hardware or administrative costs. I'm also assuming that the spam load on our mail servers is minimal enough that the costs involved there are insignificant.
That puts the total now at $184.25/year. However, without antispam software, that total would sky rocket to $821.25/year since the user would have to deal with 5x the spam. Of course, this may be high since there will probably a larger percentage of those 5-seconds-to-delete messages.
About the only interesting thing about these BS numbers is that the lower one ($184) is close to Ferris Research's estimate of $168/year; while the higher number ($821) is close to Nucleus Research's $874/year.
ÕÕ
all they have to do is have me act as the secritary for their damn email? 'smart filter' with RI (vs AI) wonder if i could start a career as a email filter...
That ancient question is "what is the cost of spam?"
...frikken bastages...
It doesn't matter that much... I suppose it might to law makers since those are the guys who care more about the cost in terms of dollars instead of other forms of cost. But to me, if it never cost anything but measures of "frustration and anger" then it simply costs too much.
Somewhere out there is a select group of people who are willing to piss me and thousands of other people off for money. These selfish bastards who, at my personal expense, want to throw crap into my email box deserve the f@cking death penalty okay? They have proven their value to the human society is less than zero so it's time to reconcile their account. They are overdrawn and they need their accounts closed. Simple enough?
And if you're a spammer, admit it and tell me why you don't deserve to die... and make it a convincing argument because I guarantee you there are those out there who are more crazy than I am.
The university is building a filter for a new $50,000 server, and it does not know yet how many of these it will need for its entire network. The task requires not only programmers but also lawyers, as the state university has to be sensitive to the First Amendment rights of the spammers.
Why hire more than one lawyer for something as trivial as "the First Amendment rights of the spammers"? Or even better, you could let some of the Seniors and Faculty of the on-campus law school elaborate in legal fashion why it costs money to listen to commercials.
Everyone must be adopting the RIAA method of calculating costs due to "illegal" actions.
Researchers: Hey, your company only makes $10 million net per year. How the hell are you claiming $1 billion in lost profit due to spam?
Company: Wha?? Look at the monkey! Look at the silly monkey...
Researchers: Oh, I see. $1 billion it is.
- I love animals. I try to eat at least one a day.
You can't legislate your way out of the spam mess. Read this: http://www.zeropath.com/bigbiz.html for an example of how Spam legislation will backfire on us all and only end up supporting Microsoft.
Next question?
-- Stamp out entropy. ->dryguy@bellsloth.net
"Spammers know they are going to be kicked off, so they won't pay their first few months' bill," said Craig Silliman, the legal director for MCI's network and facilities operation. "By the time you catch them, they turn into a net loss."
So, not only do they fail to act on SPAM reports, but they don't disconnect for failing to pay? What are they thinking? I mean, how long does it take to "catch" a SPAMMER on their own network?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
So we all could start a fund to raise enought money two buy a couple of email bundles. So we state in the email, that we need ppl to send a form email to thier state reps about the probles of spam. it would be cheap, and we can see if the spammers get good results.... killing themselves off..... intresting
They blocked the official napster servers the second the RIAA sent them a message. They just don't want to spend the possible money to possibly litigate.
Spam is a major issue for me. The 1st amendment consideration is BS. If someone comes up to me preaching (like Brother Dan for you locals), I have the ability to completely ignore him or her and walk right by without any interference in my schedule or routine. If someone comes knocking on my door, I can sit right back down without opening it. When dealing with the freedom of speech, in a one-on-one environment, that right is more dependent on the person on the receiving end than the speaker. Spam is the equivalent of someone sneaking into your house or work, and making you force them out the door after they blindside you with their sales gimmick. The first amendment is arguably the most important, but people need to realize the intent of the passage instead of the superficial words. Spam is not political or social in nature; it is deceptive advertising and should lack constitutional protection. I say, by default block it, until the user requests that you let it through for them. The right to ignore someone else's speech with minimal thought and effort is the one thing that the digital medium is lacking and in severe need of.
Spam on my university account is a major problem. Every day I get between 20 and 50 unwanted pieces of mail, about 1 to 5 from friends and family, and about 5 to 10 are school related. Filtering on the server side is nonexistent at IU, everything that is sent gets through. I can, and have, set up filtering on my computer, but that does little considering that most of the day I am on campus using either the web interface or PINE. After I lost several critical messages about class, due to my filters and hasty by-default-delete-before-thinking frustration, I gave up on my school account. The IT center wants $25 to change my username, which I won't pay, because a security breach a couple years ago allowed someone to get a large cache of usernames, SSN #'s, and other personal information. Spam is more than a nuisance for me; it has cost me my time as well as my grades (in a few situations).
The estimates vary widely from $10 billion to $87 billion per year for American workers, and even more for global costs.
Well lucky they said it was more globally, here i was thinking it would be less.
riki
"Maybe with some divine intervention, the next version of Microsoft's OS will actually be good." - Linus Torvalds
Now your mom doesn't want to check her mailbox at all anymore. But many people would just tell mom to call instead, since they no longer want to search for her letter amidst the toxic waste. And they certainly wouldn't send their kids down to stick their hand in the mailbox anymore with all those wrapped and unwrapped filthy needles.
People will stop wasting their time with email (as currently implemented), and thus this new form of communication will be strangled soon after its birth.
If any /.ers were left alone with a notorious spammer(s),
They would do worse things to their anus then Kobe did to Kaitlyn Faber.
SPAM is not just about someone being too lazy to be bothered with hitting the delete key. The costs of SPAM are incurred way before that even happens.
SPAM's biggest costs are in bandwidth and storage space for all those useless e-mail messages. If a 2 kilobyte e-mail is sent to a half-million e-mail boxes, that equals 1 GB of data transfer, plus 1 GB of e-mail storage. MSN claims they get 2.4 billion SPAM items per day. Can you see how much the bulk of spam can cost in real dollars?
And while I include only MSN in these figures, there are plenty of other ISPs and businesses out there that have to incur costs due to SPAM. No wonder this is a BIG problem.
your perspective is skewed, the problem with assosciation is that the malnutrition in fat content is easily outweighed by the mathematical enterprises which complete the necessary adjustments, you fucking moron, DUH.
Just as commercials on television pay for the programming you get to enjoy, advertisements in email are there to defray the cost of the email infrastructure. If you don't take the time to read these short, unintrusive messages, advertisers will be unwilling to pay to advertise on the internet. Who then will pay for the email system you take for granted?
The evasion of commercial email is a serious ethical, moral, and legal issue. Users caught implementing "filters" to evade their responsibilities could face an expensive lawsuit or even jail time.
We as a society must learn to respect the copyrights and first amendment rights of bulk emailers, many of whom struggle to put food on the table for their families. To summarize:
1. Commercial email deletion is a serious moral and legal issue.
2. "Everyone does it" or "I didn't know it was illegal to filter spam" are not valid excuses.
3. Filter users could face an expensive lawsuit or even jail time. To avoid this threat, just delete all spam filtering software you may have installed on your computer.
4. We will not rest until this insidious form of electronic shoplifting is eradicated for good.
Well, it does beget a whole new sub-industry in computing: spam-detection heuristics.
While I hate spam as much as the next person, we (Americans in this case) have to look at it from a more legal and governmental nature. While alot of us would chomp at the bit to outlaw spam, set fines and jailtime for spammers, you have to look at what that would do to the laws over the internet. It would set a precident stating that the governments of the world HAVE CONTROL OVER THE INTERNET. This is bad... very very bad.
First of all, the first thing that would come out the door after the anti-spam laws would be taxes. That's right, taxes on E-mail, taxes on webpage badnwidth, taxes on everything. Why have they not done this yet? Because the governments cannot establish that they have any ruling or administrating connection to the internet, therefore they cannot tax it. Once an internet law is passed, taxes will follow.
After taxes will come modified libel(slander) laws, court cases over websites (i.e.: he has an anti-gay site, I'm sueing!!), next maybe even such things over e-mail and the like.
Passing any internet-based law would open the door for the government to get its paws on the one truly unmoderated frontier left in the world. They futz with it enough as it is, do we really need that?
Thinking outside the box is so big now that doing so is really putting youself back in the box. There is no box.
$10Trillion (order of magnitude for US GNP)/365 days/24hrs day/1000000 * $1 each
Now I have seen where some ISP send "2 million spams an hour" it doesn't seem unreasable that all the ISP's could be offering up a billion spams/hour.
I don't think spam (as much as I loath it) is costing the US economy $Trillions dollars, ergo, I suspect the "true cost" is far less than $1.00 per spam.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
What kind of BS is that? No they do not.
IU and other public institutions are NOT lawmakers, nor are they free public resources. Now if individual students are doing the spamming, there may be some complexities to deal with, especially if other students are the targets of the spam. But public schools are not a resource that anyone may just freely use.
If the school does make certain facilities open for public use, then they do have to do so fairly. That means, for example, if a facility like a stadium is used for a convention by members of the public (and usually these are done on a basis of school use has first priority, student use second priority, and public use last and usually paid), then spammers would probably have to be given equal access as members of the public. So you might see a spammer's convention meeting there.
The real issues are:
Does Kinkos have a right to post signs anywhere on school property to advertise their copying services to students? No! They must follow specific rules. There might be places designated for signs to be posted. The school newspaper might be advertising supported and Kinkos could buy ad space there. The school might even sell naming rights to the gymnasium to Kinkos (if they want to buy that). But there exists no free right for anyone, not even students or faculty, to come and commandeer any resource they wish for their own purposes.
Certainly this rules out students spamming the internet, and I would argue it also gives no one in the public any particular right to communicate with a student on the school's network, even if the student grants that permission by signing up for advertising. The school owns the property and it is generally well considered to not be public use property. The school is definitely not preventing people from using their own personal property/resources when that school restricts the ways the school's property/resources are used to be limited to what the mission of the school is.
It might be a whole different matter if a government entity were setting up a network, such as an open WiFi node, for anyone in the public to make use of. That is not what public institutions of higher learning do.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
People who think the first amendment gives a flying rat's ass about spam are either morons, ignorami, or non-lawyers.
"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit," wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger in a 1970 decision. "We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another." Chief Justice Burger, U.S. Supreme Court ROWAN v. U. S. POST OFFICE DEPT., 397 U.S. 728 May 4, 1970.
Of course, the spammer, in his infinite wisdom, would most likely retort: "but we're not the vendors, we're just working for them!"
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
What is the main purspose of SPAM?To sell something or to direct you to a site.So there has to be a contact for either of these two.Simple next time anyone spams you, you spam them back.Take some time to read that mail and then start sending mail every 30 sec why you dont like them to mail you.
Wanted : A Signature.
It can be much more than just pressing the delete button. For instance, I find SMS notifications for e-mails very useful, so I know right away when I have received an important e-mail even when I'm not at my computer. So, I have to take my mobile phone out of the pocket, press one button to see the SMS and two to delete it. The spam mail is, of course, still on the mail server and has to be deleted.
Because of filters, I don't receive many SMS notifications for spam mails, but the filters themselves mean quite a lot of work and/or paying for services (I'm a student and work part-time at different companies, so I have to do that with an e-mail address of my own).
It can also happen that I have to read an e-mail when there is no computer around. I can read my e-mails on the mobile phone, but GPRS bandwith is relatively expensive, and with the small display, it takes quite a long time to navigate to the wanted mail if there is a lot of spam.
Then there is additional work because I have to empty backup mailboxes more often etc. Especially with reading mails on the phone, a large amount of spam can mean that takes so long and costs so much that it isn't an option any more, and that's really a loss, although it's hard to express it in numbers.
With good filters, it shouldn't happen, but as the situation is now, I often hear people asking someone to send a mail again because their strict filter rules removed it or because they can't find it any more in the large heap of spam. If spam continues to increase, it could well be that soon people with good mail filters will have such problems, too.
Spam has a very bad effect on the usability of the mail system, and it threatens to render recent technological progress useless (e.g. PDAs with integrated mobile phones are much less suitable for receiving and sending mails when you're on the way when that means that you have to pay for much more GPRS data and wait much longer because of spam).
I wish my cable ISP was this clueless, but no matter how bad the service gets, they always seem to be able to keep it straight when I owe them money. I miss a bill and Im looking at snow and "cannot be found"s in no time flat.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Sure, spam has cost me a lot over the years, but if this deal comes through helping Mrs. Mariam Sese-Seko (widow of late president Mobuto Sese-Seko of Zaire) transfer her money out of the country, I'll have more than broke even!
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
...filtering to provide you with a tool which automatically learns who you normally receive emails from and not mark them as SPAM? Bayes appears to be much smarter and adaptable than custom rulesets.
I know that at least SpamAssassin and bogofilter will specifically learn message headers appropriately as you train your filter.
Once you train enough of your spammy eBay notices as HAM, you should not have to worry about having them get marked as SPAM anymore.
If people would set up their email servers correctly, I could eliminate 99% of the spam from my systems. Unfortunately, a bunch of administrators seem to feel that they do not actually have to configure their systems correctly. If I want to be able to receive mail from them, then I need to open my server up and allow misconfigured servers to talk to it. Guess who has the majority of (usually intentionally) misconfigured servers. You guessed it, spammers.
Getting rid of spam is simple. Stop bitching about it and fix your own damned mail server.
Do you:
Just my two cents.
-sirket
Depending on your mail system.
At my workplace, we use Lotus Notes and when you add up the time to download the message into your machine, click on it to bring it up (at my work, the set up will not let you delete messages without reading them first), hit "escape" to close it and then delete, you could have lost a full minute or more doing something else.
Sigh.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
The lost productivity due to spam is inconsequential compared to the lost productivity due to Slashdot.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
Spammers are marketing parasites on services that we pay for. I have an email address so that people I want to hear from can send me messages, not so that I can receive unsolicited marketing.
In an ideal world, spammers could be sued for theft of services, or could be forced to subsidize the connectivity costs of the recipient. I wouldn't mind spam so much if each piece I received deposited $0.25 or so into my paypal account. I'd still filter it, but at least I'd be paid for my troubles.
Marketers are free to put up web sites, and even pay to advertise on other sites, but they don't have a right to blast everyone on the net with random garbage.
The First Amendment guarantees each American Freedom of expression. It does not guarantee that anyone has to listen to you.
It's amazing how many people are screaming:
"There's no way spam costs $1/message"
"It doesn't take me that long to hit the delete key."
[sarcasm]What an amazing, informative analysis[/sarcasm]
First off, they're probably figuring their cost as their take home pay. This is much too low.
Say I was to make around $25/hr. That says nothing about all the other hidden costs/tradeoffs going on. I could be making that much, but the corp. I work for could be billing for my time at a rate of $1000/day. If they have a substantial backlog of contracts, they basically are loosing out on that much money if I don't work for a day.
Now lets do some math. $1000/8hours = 125 dollars / hour * 1 hour / 60 min = $2.08 / minute
Say it takes me 15 seconds to open up outlook, see the message, realize it's spam, delete it, and go back to what I was doing. That's $.52 right there.
Then you have to add in other costs.
How much did/does it cost to store that email? How much did it cost to download it (including the gifs)? How much of your IT staff's time is devoted to reducing spam, upgrading mailservers, deleting old mail, backing up mail, etc? Is that email you just got from Hamza Kalu just spam, or an event that should be reported to corporate security? (Some businesses do have to worry about fraud/industrial espionage via forged email.) How much time did you spend thinking about that? Five seconds? Ten?
Is the spam clever enough to fool other, less tech savvy people? (I once recieved a fake email from BestBuy.com's fraud dept, the would be pretty convincing to someone who doesn't know much about conputers.) How much time do you spend warning them?
Spam is costing businesses a significant amout of money. It may cost less for some and more for others, but it seems some people have no idea how quickly the dollar signs add up when you're running a business. I know I have a tough time wrapping my brain around it.
Life is too short to proofread.
$0.00
Seriously, if spam costs so much, what about personal emails, jokes, chain letters, etc? I mean, come on, get real. If you see an email is spam, just delete it. How long does it take you to delete an email? It takes me about 1 second.Well, on behalf of those who shirk on the job (I'm not one of them!), here's another way to get out of doing your work. I have some old bosses who is in the group of shirkers, I'm sure they love receiving spam. :p
I hate reading about figures based on 'loss of productivity' and such crap.. By that logic I think we need to start sueing theaters for wasting my time with commercials, making the movie experience take longer than the running time... the city for doing road construction that made my commute longer.. telemarketers for interupting diner.. bulk mail companies for having to spend an extra 10 sec to find my bills and throw away the rest... basically anything in life that is slightly annoying.
:/
Hell... by that logic, computer workers that read slashdot daily must cost US biz. billions a year.
Aren't they missing a major component of the total cost of spam? Filtering far and away is the most expensive aspect of spam. It doesn't cost Joe Blow much to delete or use MUA filters to dump spam that gets through. It takes one hell of a lot of time to maintain blacklists, keep scoring software up to date (something that is an absolute MUST), deal with the increased CPU load and disk space consumption due to the scoring and archiving, and reporting to the FTC and NANAS. That certainly isn't free and this article doesn't even take that into account. It takes Suzy Q well under 5 minutes to deal with her daily intact of spam. It takes a full-time admin to deal with the spam filtering at a large site. Which costs more? Certainly not the trivial amount of users' time.
20 to 40 a day? Is this at work?
I make it a habit to check the privacy policy of any website that requires my email address. I've got a hotmail account for those I don't care to check or for those that have bad policies.
I never use my work email to sign up for things, I rarely have my work email published anywhere (mailling lists, etc.). I honestly don't think I've gotten any spam on my work account since I started (summer of 2000). I might have confused one or two with my other accounts, but I can't say.
That said... is my experience really limited? Do a lot of folks just work for companies with such popular domains that spammers do dictionary attacks? Do folks use their work email address to sign up for "e-greetings" and "quiz your friends.com"? Or am I missing something?
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
Remember, you should think big! If you want to make more than $1 per spam, contact me about my new work at home program that pays you big $$$$!
I can say that spam does cost. Many calls I get have me spending time walking clueless people through the steps necessary to enable the server-side spam filter and the client-side mail rules.
It doesn't end there, either. From what users are saying, it seems like spammers trade their mailing lists which cause users to recieve increasing amounts of spam. Some users complain that it takes too long to download the spam. I kindly remind them that not only does our mail server have to download the mail but also transmit the mail to them.
Figure you are on a bit of mailing lists, and you receive 500K of spam per day (some messages are html with images). The ISP has to use 1000k (say a megabyte) for that user. Multiply that by 4,000 users, and you have 4 GB of data transfer. Think of it as a T1 simultaneously using maximum up and down bandwidth for almost THREE HOURS.
That is not even mentioning the users who get on a billion mailing lists and never check their mail/delete their messages. Say (a conservative figure) 50 users got 500K of spam per day. That's almost 750 MB/month. 9 gigs of hard drive gone in the name of unread spam in a year. It all adds up folks.
Screw the Do-Not-Call list, I would rather have had a Do-Not-Email list _first_. When an occasional telemarketer calls my home or my workplace, there is a ~30 second distraction. End of story. Nothing like a day of 20 minute phone calls walking users through setting up spam filters and explaining to them why they get so much spam. Although my job is a part-time one, I figure around $150 in labor is paid by both parties per day (the ISP and customers) to set up a *workaround* (which sometimes isn't enough for high-volume victims of spam).
Take the cost of running a mail server. Hardware, upgrades, bandwidth, administration.
Multiply by 40-60%. This is the noise part of the signal-noise ratio that is e-mail. I'm sure you get the picture.
And that's if you don't even try to squelch the noise. Hardware and administration costs go up exponentially when you start diverting CPU time from sorting mail to filtering it.
Oh, and don't forget the problem is getting worse - exponentially.
It won't be long until 80-90% of the cost of running a mail server goes towards dealing with ads for things that would make the ACLU wish they hadn't fought the CDA. Now consider how much money Sprint spends on providing e-mail to their clients. And consider how Sprint would love to see 70-80% of that cost go away. I would imagine the next conservative administration would introduce legislation that would legalize the public flogging of spammers, just based on pressure from big business, nevermind the public.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
It looks like the problem is increasingly one of messages that are not spam, but get blocked by filters or by trigger-happy pressing of the 'D' key. Since no filter and no human can ever be entirely accurate at detecting what is spam given only a few seconds to look at each message, and the spam being sent is evolving to look more like genuine messages at a quick glance, this problem will only get worse.
What's needed is some way to mark messages as 'definitely not spam' so that filters can ignore them. Some have used PGP signatures for this in the past, but I'm getting an increasing amount of PGP-signed spam. The trouble is that generating a PGP signature is not costly for the spammer.
However a system like Hash Cash could work, because it costs a few seconds of CPU time per message to mark it, making the system unusable by spammers who need to send hundreds of thousands of messages to break even. A message with the right amount of postage attached could be let through by filters; in the long run it would be better for mail user agents to do the filtering themselves based on a postage rate set by the user, but right now it would have to be done on the server with a fixed postage rate (perhaps equivalent to 5 seconds of CPU time on a current low-end PC).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
www.spambayes.org
Having disabled my spam filtering I had 42(!) emails this morning, 39 of which were spam, all but two of which had been picked up by my filters according a quick grep for the X-Header. Total time to go through all the emails and manually select the spam for deletion based purely on sender/subject was a touch over two minutes. To make things more interesting, I manually submitted all thirty nine spams to the SpamCop webform, and the total time I spent was still less than quarter of an hour.
So, even without *any* automated filtering, that's just five minutes a day for the raw delete, or half an hour for the SpamCop submissions. Multiply out, and for the entire year I am looking at 30 hours and 180 hours respectively (without filtering, remember). If you factor in my filtering, the total time is maybe 5 hours a year, on the outside. With the unrealistic exception of manually SpamCopping every spam, it's hardly in the cost to employer bracket these people keep citing now, is it?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
The estimates vary widely from $10 billion to $87 billion per year for American workers, and even more for global costs.
Although most of the IP addresses in the world were allocated to the US (and the US started the Internet), a hell of a lot of the rest of the world uses the distributed inter-networking protocols. All spam that gets through my filters is from a US company targeting solely US residents (I've investigated the odd one I'm interested in and I'm not eligible as I'm not a US citizen).
EU and UK anti-spam laws cannot be targeted at US spammers. I get so much useless noise - useless because I don't want it and cannot use it even if I wanted to. In the name of worldwide social responsibility, sort out your spammers. As of yet, I still haven't received UK-resident targeted spam.
In my experience, the problem is US-based and I don't have the power to do anything against your spamming companies and I'm unlikely to have that power any time soon. Please, sort yourselves out!
According to some recent statistics, almost 2 million households in the UK now have broadband Internet access. There are only 56 million people in the UK. Assume the average broadband household has 4 people in it (which is entirely plucked out of thin air), and that means 1 in 7 UK residents have broadband at home. We're heavy users of the Internet and I don't see why we should be besieged by unruly US spammers when it is a wasted of both our resources.
if SPAM costs soo much why is no-one doing something?
... something is seriously f#ck up!
... or is it Mad Cow disease?
i'm mean just the lower estimate (10 billion)
10'000'000'000
should be reason enough to improve SMTP or
phase it out!
if their where 10 billion computers it's buck
per. yes?
is it just nostalgia or what?
so instead of solving the problem they just make a new law and the lawyers cash in again...
lawyers and law-makers who can bearly operate a computer (if it has a mouse) make laws for networks/computer?
so many computer programmers but without a job
i'm starting to believe their is virus or something secretly chuwing away at peoples braincells
Spam just started costing us time.
The office manager aked if anyone has ever read his spamassasin reports and now the whole office started looking through their trash to find who has the highest Spamassasin score.
(Highest up to now is 47.7)
Or am I missing something?
Yes, you're missing the people who have had their email addresses for longer than the short time that you've had yours. Back before spam was a problem, nobody knew it was necessary to post to Usenet or other publicly viewable mailing lists using a fake email address.
It's really about a bunch of senior executive yes-men overreacting. Usually what happens is something like this:
Exec: "Oh look, somebody is trying to extend my member. I hate spam."
Assistant: (takes mental note and walks into a neighbouring execs office, usually somebody in IT, and says) "--insert head hancho's name-- is getting deluged with spam, it's a real problem. Could we have somebody come up here and do something?"
IT Exec: "That's unfortunate, I'll see what I can do"
IT Exec: (calls personal friend in technical support (kiss-ass middle management), chats about golf, the latest corporate results, a couple real business related things, and adds: --insert head hancho's name-- is having a real problem with Spam, can we do anything?
Kiss-ass middle managment: (calls lower management of tech support) "--insert head hancho's name-- has a critical presentation to do and their computer won't work anymore! Send somebody up there quick! I don't care what they're doing, this takes priority, this is --insert head hancho's name--!"
Lower management to techie(this response can really vary): "--insert head hancho's name--'s computer is messed up, I need you to pop up and have a look. --kiss assed middle management-- is very concerned, so this is unfotunately high profile."
Techie, calls Assistant: "What's up?"
Assistant: "We're being killed with spam, --insert head hancho's name-- is furious, get up here now!"
Techie to Exec: "Hello, --assistant-- says you're being killed with spam, do you have any of it left?"
Exec: "No, I deleted it, don't worry about it"
Techie: "Next time you get one, hang on to it and we might be able to do something about it. --spout summarized corporate spam policy--. Do you need anything else?"
Exec: "No, that's all for now, thanks."
...and the end result is that everyone it the IT department thinks that the top exec doesn't know how to hit the delete key.
Not to say that there aren't technophobes in senior management, but in my experience, they're quick learners. Just tell them what to do and they'll remember. Often to your detriment.
>But what happens if you go on holiday for a month?
Good point. I neglected to check email from one of my ISPs for 3 months. Last Saturday, I finally decided that it's time to do some cleaning up, so I tried to open Outlook but kept getting errors. When I called up that ISP, the support person gave me the shocking news that my mailbox contained 14,000 messages! So I used Telnet to go into Pine, did a final skim for important messages, and finally closed down my account of 7 years.
Download Mazes and Puzzles from www.puz.com
Viruses, for end users, often create a situation where a computer becomes somewhat "squirrelly." A call goes out to IT, perhaps, and the response is someone discovering a virus and either repairing the damage or taking other steps to resolve the problem. The effect of a virus can be similar to bugs in the OS, problems with hardware, and so on. Many times users don't even know their systems are infected until someone from the security group stops by with the news that their PC is trying to DOS someone outside the site.
There is little mystery with spam. It's annoying, resource intensive, and above all, obvious. It affects virtually anyone with an e-mail account, so people see it at work as well as at home, and it doesn't discriminate about whose mailbox it ends up in.
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
We bought Ironmail (http://www.ciphertrust.com/ironmail/) after increasing complaints from our users about junk email.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
The actual problem is the opportunity cost of the loss of legitimate email, both inbound and outbound. Files we send to customers often bounce back because attachments aren't allowed anymore (more of a virus thing than a spam thing, I suppose), requiring time to find alternatives (FTP or mail a CD?). Even emails without attachments are trapped by customer spam lists. Our mailserver has been unfairly blacklisted once or twice (some zealots put you on the list for sending an email circular to paying customers!) and as a result there are several customers we can't email at all. Emails customers send to us sometimes bounce back to them as spam -- this is the worst one, because we never even realise there's a problem unless they call us and complain (in which case it's always ourfault).
The real problem is that email is no longer a reliable means of communication. What is the value of a communication channel that loses many of its messages?
Well, yeah, and serial killers beget criminal profilers, but I doubt anyone considers that a good thing.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
As usual I chime in 7 days after the article is posted with my irrelevant thoughts that nobody will read. Oh well.
The people who "just hit delete" are probably the most efficient, as far as cost per spam, than any of us.
Once you start hating it, and get sucked into the life of filtering, you waste a lot of time. "My filter handles it fine" is BS - what about all those work hours you've spent finding them, trying them, writing them, tweaking them? Or, have you been using the same spam filter since 1992 and it works for everything? If so, you better sell it.
Being interested in anti-spam even leads you to post messages on Slashdot about what you do about spam. Probably during work.
Also, the time that IT spends investigating anti-spam solutions at the server level and dissecting emails to find out why a deluge of messages just got past the filters costs money.
The collective aggravation level of everyone in the company is the determining factor for the IT Dept. to choose how much time and people to put into the anti-spam effort. The worse spam gets, the more people are annoyed, and the more it costs since it becomes a higher priority issue with the IT Dept.
# Erik
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Lawrence Lessig suggested a system of spam bounties - make spam illegal (unless marked by a standardized subject header for trivial filtering), charge hefty fines for violator, and use the money to reward the first spam recipient who finds the sender (and proves their guilt). Now, of course that would be easily circumvented by national boundaries (just move the spamming offshore to a third-world country), but since most of the Internet is used by industrialized countries that would all hate spam, they can easily bully other nations into enacting the same laws (with mutual extradition). Much like drug laws, except smuggling would be a lot harder, so it might actually work.
20-40/day is about average - if I count the e-mail that comes specifically targeted at my user e-mail.
Tack on another 20-60 per day for spam that is aimed at webmaster@, postmaster@, root@... etc. - fortunately, that's sortable and it doesn't take long to scan the subject lines before "select all - delete".
My mail client sorting rules are based on the whitelist principle, which at least gets the spam segregated out for later review. What is annoying about whitelist/blacklist is that spammers are able to forge domains (my vote is for OX records to be added to DNS so my mail server can dump e-mail from IPs not listed as outbound mail exchanges from the supposed source domain).
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
For all the quoting of the constitution, particularly the first ammendment, I'm amazed at how few Americans have actually read it. So, here it is:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise therof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievences."
The first phrase is about the freedom of religion. The second is about the freedom of speech. The final is about freedom assemble and to petition the government. All of what anyone has to say about the right to "free speech" comes from five words "abridging the freedom of speech".
Spam (also known as Unsolicited Commercial EMail) is, by definition, none of the protected rights, most particularly the freedom of speech. Often we discuss "free speech", so let's discern between "free" speech and "commercial" speech*. Free speech doesn't involve commerce, and doesn't cost the listener (or reader) money. SPAM, involves commerce, but not religion, not the press, not the right to assemble, and not the right to petition government (except maybe those government grant scams). In turn, it costs the listener (or reader) money in lost wages and bandwidth. So, it's anything but "free".
Furthermore, the First Ammendment NEVER granted anyone the right to lie. That means the responsibility to tell the truth would remain, even if some liberal judge deemed SPAM constitutionally protected. It would be "illegal" speech if the SPAM message contained lies, fraudulent statements, misleading statements or solicitations to engage in illegal activities. Such is certainly not protected by the first ammendment, similar to liable and slander not being protected.
Sorry for the rant, but the original article brought up first ammendment rights which people toss about way too carelessly. If one person has a right to send me a message, I certainly have a right to curtail it. I have a right to petition the government that I don't want my privacy and time imposed upon by an unsolicited scoundrel type.
* Several supreme court decisions have disected the phraseology and defined "free" vs "commercial" speech, so in light of such precedence, I think it fair to apply similar criteria to SPAM.
That is a CRAP load of money to be spending on canned spam. Plus why are all these CEO's and company "higher up's" so interested. Suuurrree it tastes weird, but we all knew that to begin with.
In 45 days time, here are my company's official spam stats.
Total email processed: 271,217
Total junk email identified: 239,560
88.32779% of email sent to our company is identified as spam.
That's over 6000 a day.
That's over 67 per account per day.
Before we installed a spam filter (you may feel free to ask me which), each person had to sift through their hypothetical 10 emails and delete almost 9 spams.
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.