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Lawmakers Try to Protect Kids From Spam
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Some states have moved to shield children from email peddling porn, alcohol and other adults-only products, the Wall Street Journal reports. Critics say the laws, which establish a registry of kids' email addresses, are unfair to marketers and could create security risks. The debate echoes earlier discussion about a proposed do-not-spam national registry that the Can-Spam Law urged, but which the FTC nixed. This time, though, the registries are moving forward on a state-by-state basis, and facing court challenges from the adult entertainment industry." From the article: "Few email addresses have been placed on the state registries so far. Earlier this week, Utah's registry had 1,992 addresses, and 62 schools had registered their domain names to block emails to student accounts. About 160 companies had submitted their email lists for screening. In Michigan, 3,658 email addresses have been registered, along with 41 school domains. About 170 marketers had applied for screening."
Do it on your own dime...my bandwidth and server space cost me money. Funny how you're all for the "free market" until one of its finer points inconveniences you.
Good, it costs YOU money. YOUR bandwidth and YOUR server don't cost ME money.
Make a law, and it does.
Sorry, but the free market requires that you maintain the items you own. Running a server requires paying for securing that server from attacks -- including e-mail spam attacks. Laws won't stop them. Again, the free market works.
So, if I submit my email address to this database, and just say it belongs to a kid, I can stop recieving v!@gr@ spam?
Your remarks while insightful for your situation are somewhat less so for mine.
Are you actually proposing that I shift some of my larger clients with 300+ employees to *gmail*? Sorry, but I like my job.
I also can't use ancient and wheezy Linux boxes in that kind of environment. My clients need horsepower in order to run their groupware applications, as well as their email.
Besides, have you ever looked to see how much SPAM can be sent to 300+ corporate accounts? It can be a signicant amount of bandwidth, storage space, and processor power. This stuff just isn't free, no matter how much you want to trivialize it in order to bolster your case.
As an aside you aren't hosting enterprise, hell even business class, 'net connections on a $20 a month unlimited account. Try a couple of T1s at upwards of $300 per month.
In addition to the hardware charge, every users TIME counts towards the "delete the 50 spam messages I got today" bill.
300 users x 5 minutes each to deal with SPAM = 1500 minutes.
1500 minutes / 60 minutes in an hour = 25 wasted hours per day.
25 hours per day x $25 per hour (avg employee wage) = $625 per day.
$625 per day x 20 working days per month = $12,500
$12,500 per month x 12 months per year = $150,000 per year.
I don't know about you but where I come from $150,000 per year in lost productivity is worth notice. It's a problem, and the higher your average wage the more of dollar loss it is.
In short, while I think you have some great ideas on how to run your business, you don't have much experience with larger companies and it shows.
I'll still be reading your posts though. I may not agree with you but at least you're logical in your approach.