Slashdot Mirror
Spam Costs U.S. Companies $22B Annually
KoReE writes "According to this CNN article, a study at the University of Maryland says the loss of productivity from spam is costing U.S. companies $22 billion per year."
Of course, they also say people get 18.5 spam per day, and I'm tipping in at 20x that.
Welllllll depending upon how you look at it, I have four different email accounts (one work, two personal, one throwaway). Three of them get no spam, or one piece of spam every other week. One of them is my "sure I'd like to d/l this trial software here's an email account" account that gets hit with, on average, 50 pieces of mail a day.
It's more about intelligent handling of the addy than just having an inbox.
Would I prefer that Spam be stopped dead in it's tracks? Regardless of this, yes, because it also occours to me how much time I've wasted on this problem that I could have used doing other more productive things.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
Yes, having to post your email address for others to see on a web site is no longer a requirement. Especially since most of the web hosting companies will provide you with a free formmail script.
:)
I took a few steps to curb spam in 2002: first, change my email address. That alone put an abrupt halt to the flow. Second, added comments forms to all my web sites, to stop the future flow.
Granted, I still get some spam, assumedly because some messages that I send get forwarded and harvested somewhere. I get about 2 or 3 spam emails per week right now, without using any filters at all. So that's acceptable to me.
I continue to advise people to change their darn email address and start anew. It's pretty easy to do for *most* people. I just don't understand the paralyzing fear that overcomes them when I suggest that. I also think that "but my business email address has to stay the same!" is not a valid argument. I have assisted some people here at the university that I work in getting a brand new email address, and (surprise) life went on and people still managed to send them email.
On a side note, I switched to a different bank in 2002, one with no monthly fees. I was amazed at how easy it was to do, and now I must be their most vocal evangelist. I'm constantly reassuring people that they, too, can stop paying monthly services charges to their bank. I think I have six converts so far
And no, 2002 wasn't some magical year of transformation. I think it's just coincidental...
Todd
Okay. You tell that to the spammers. Ask them to politely stop, because no one deserves it. See them laugh at you.
Spam is a fact of life, now. There's nothing you can do about it, except take a defensive position.
The article spoke of the impact on end users. The simple solution to this problem is to prevent it from reaching the end users. There are simple and highly effective means to do this. I've personally seen many companies that are unwilling to investigate these means, and just let the problem proliferate.
So in my opinion, yes, they desrve what they get for being lazy in the tech department.
It's a simple cost to benefit ratio, as long as enough people buy things off spam, spammers will continue to operate.
I live in Mexico. Here (in Mexico city) there are thousands illegal taxis running. People don't care just as long as they get to their destination. Of course, the number of innocents being raped, kidnapped or assaulted in these illegal cabs.
If people stopped using them, our taxi assault problems would be over.
Generalizing, if people don't care about promoting assaults and rapes in illegal cabs, do you think they'll give a sh*t about SPAM?
I am running Spamassassin 3.0 (using qmail-scanner) with Razor, Pyzor, clamav and F-prot. 90% of the email coming into my server (with 10 or so users) is spam, but with the Razor rules and the URI blacklists turned way up one a day or so gets through, and no false positives yet that I have found. (I won't even talk about the 30+ viri a day.) Qmail-scanner can be set to reject mail at the SMTP level too, which doesn't save much bandwidth but does prevent extra work from bounces bouncing etc.
12:50 - press return.
How do they actually figure those $s? I mean, I don't doubt that spam is a problem and it does costs us, but do they really know how long it takes each of us to delete, ignore, *woops!-open* or similarly waste our time on it? I've never actually seen a study that does figure these things properly. With the virus industry for instance, I am very suspicious that the "computer viruses cost us $X" lines are way over estimated on purpose just to get more business for the anti-virus firms. But for that to be the case with spam, there has to be companies that can profit from such studies. Who would that be? Besian (sp?) filter firms? Mozilla? Were they even supporters of the study to begin with?
Just seems like a waste of time at this point. Everyone already knows this stuff is hurting us anyway.
My personal solution (and this is not a paid promotion) was to use Firefox. Instead of spending nearly an hour every day deleting spam, I now spend about 5 minutes. That's my solution. And seeing as the government won't do anything about this anytime soon, I think it's one that most people will end up using.
I started agressively firewalling off spammy isps sometime ago, and its really paid off for me. I get maybe 1 spam a week (i check 10 different accounts). 5 different rbl's catch whatever spam my firewall doesnt get.
By carefully white listing people dumb enough to host on a spammy isp whose email i still want, i dont have a problem with collateral damage either.
http://mail.btfh.net/spam.txt
http://mail.btfh.net/asia-spam.txt
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
Since I read about a new spam study every other day, I'm wondering if that $22B price tag includes the cost of all the studies being done about the cost of spam?
/.?
All of these "annual amount of money lost due to X" studies are bullshit.
This is saying that $22B a year is "lost" due to people spending an average of 2.8 minutes a day deleting emails.
Well, how much paper has email saved over the years? How much time has email saved? How much does taking a dump cost businesses annually? What about reading
I've been hearing these "take a miniscule amount of thing X and multiply it by the number of people Y and report REALLY BIG NUMBER Z" studies all my life.
Who cares?
Lets do a more interesting and relevant study for people for a change. How many hundreds of millions of dollars would be saved if we switched to a 4 day workweek? How about the quality of life for everyone having at least 3 day weekends every week? That sounds interesting.
You know, I refuse to worry about it. It's bullshit that I should have to obscure my address to avoid getting messages that try to circumvent filters. It's one thing to get an ad in your email. With Bayesian filters and other types of filtering, I can get rid of most of the spam that comes through. It's the ones that have a paragraph from a book, or the bible, or just random words to confuse the filters at the bottom of the message that pisses me off. "Buy C1al1s! Love, Grandma"
The email address I have on here is already up to about 600 spam messages a day, so it's well tainted. I have a couple of them I do not make public, however. My address is 9 years old. I dont' think there's a 9-year old email address out there that isn't hammered with spam.
Instant Karma's gonna get you...