# What's so horribly evil about "spam" email? **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [August 6, 2003, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255 "2003-08-06T02:30:19Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![hansel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/6bbea6/32.png) [@hansel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hansel)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 2:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/81 "2003-08-07T02:26:45Z")
$6,000 flat + $1,500/year is the price quote from a company in California that offers a combination product/service, an email gateway. Essentially, they put a computer on our network that filters all the mail going to our mail server. The $6,000 is the cost of the computer, software, and installation; the $1,500/year is a service fee to them to keep updating our spam filter with their blacklists (the figure is based on the number of mailboxes we have, approximately 200). It’s a black box solution: we pay them, their box takes care of everything. Their offering is about par for the course, at the bottom end; I’ve seen much more expensive offerings. Think of it as $13,500 across 5 years. There are other options, but none as good as our current setup: external mailhosting that incorporates spam filtering. For reasons of company IS policy, and technical reasons, that’s not as good as hosting our own mail server, and would probably cost about half as much. Our company is too large to make effective use of Yahoo mail accounts, and isn’t really a good image for us to project anyway. Another option would be to roll our own, which would require expertise we don’t have, which would require a consultant, who would cost a lot more than $13,500. $13,500 is less than a tenth of a percent of our total sales; on the other hand, we’ve been losing money this year, so imagine sitting down with the president to argue that we should spend that to eliminate what you term as a ‘minor annoyance’. Now, we’re one company, and we’re not very large. Multiply that cost across every company in America, adjust for size, and then take a percentage of that figure for the number of companies that actually buy the solution. Say there are 1,000,000 companies in America with revenues greater than $1,000,000 (according to [this site](http://www.bizstats.com/bizsizes98.htm)). Considering our company as a weighted average size (a conservative estimate, I think), and that’s $13,500,000,000. Say only 10% of those companies subscribe to the bottom line service I quoted (which is radically insufficient for, say, IBM), and that’s a floor of $1,350,000,000/5 years in lost profit for American businesses, solely attributed to spam. I think that’s a conservative figure, since all of my assumptions were conservative or accurate. Still think spam has a trivial cost? ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 2:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/82 "2003-08-07T02:28:59Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by RexDart \* > \*\*I think spam may be simply a cost of using email as a primary means of communication. Documents can be faxed, communication can be done through phone conversation. \*\* It’s a multinational world, kid. I have business dealings in several different time zones, in the U.S., Europe and Asia. When my Asian collegues are working, it’s the middle of the night in the U.S. I send out a bunch of emails and get responses the next day. You are a clueless, inexperienced, little boy who is way over his head. I will agree with you on one point though and I was ready to agree with you when I saw the post title. Then I read your lame OP and had to join the other side. Like people who park in handicapped parking spaces, spammers are not nearly as evil as some frothing at the mouth people make them out to be. They’re bad but more on the level of thieves than murderers. To say that they’re only annoying is just as far off as to say that they’re Nazis. It’s really somewhere in the middle, say the 4th or 5th circle of Hell. Haj ---
**Author:** ![neutron\_star](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/51bf81/32.png) [@neutron\_star](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/neutron_star)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 2:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/83 "2003-08-07T02:36:56Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by amore ac studio \* > \*\*Actually, **neutron star** , that cost was mentioned in the very first reply to the thread. \*\* Huh? > [@](#): > > When you’re Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail or AOL Mail, all that spam is residing on your harddrive and it’s a problem. Not only does that not even mention backup, but it’s not even correct! Webmail services store the email on their servers. Unless the user copies and pastes his email to his hard drive or something, the spam isn’t even on his drive. Of course, that’s not true with regular POP3 boxes, as the default setting for clients is to delete mail from the server the first time they download it; it’s then moved immediately to their hard drives. ---
**Author:** ![RexDart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/b77776/32.png) [@RexDart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RexDart)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 3:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/84 "2003-08-07T03:17:18Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by hansel \* > \*\*It’s a black box solution: we pay them, their box takes care of everything. Their offering is about par for the course, at the bottom end; I’ve seen much more expensive offerings. Think of it as $13,500 across 5 years. > > \ > > Considering our company as a weighted average size (a conservative estimate, I think), and that’s $13,500,000,000. Say only 10% of those companies subscribe to the bottom line service I quoted (which is radically insufficient for, say, IBM), and that’s a floor of $1,350,000,000/5 years in lost profit for American businesses, solely attributed to spam. > > I think that’s a conservative figure, since all of my assumptions were conservative or accurate. Still think spam has a trivial cost? \*\* So your company spends $2700 per year over a 5 year period to fight spam. Maybe that _is_ a trivial cost. I mean, that’s probably about one tenth the salary of a common employee, not even considering the expense of any benefits package. That means the company will be spending ten times their spam-fighting expense just paying a single employee. Now, I’m sure that employee is productive, he’s not just a bottomless well, but it’s still an expense. Now how many employees work at the company? How many non-productive useless middle-management types making 5 times that salary might be sitting around right now just waiting to be “streamlined” or “reorganized”? Maybe alot, maybe none. Point is, $2700 may in fact be a pretty trivial cost compared to the overall expenditures of that company. For a single company on the scale of yours, firing one unproductive low-level employee would save 10 times the money that eliminating all spam in the known universe would save. And what is the total size of the US economy? Does the $8.9 billion of **LudditeAndroid** ’s cite even make a dent on it? ---
**Author:** ![neutron\_star](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/51bf81/32.png) [@neutron\_star](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/neutron_star)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 3:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/85 "2003-08-07T03:44:47Z")
Spammers pay a pittance to send their trash. Companies pay **billions** to process, receive, store, and sort through their scams. You see this as a trivial cost? Most bank robbers only get away with a few thousand dollars. If I rob a bank once a year, is that okay? I mean, I’m barely impacting the economy at all, right? :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![techchick68](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ea5d25/32.png) [@techchick68](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/techchick68)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 3:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/86 "2003-08-07T03:45:02Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by RexDart \* > I had meant to ask you about what exactly your costs are going towards. Is this $6000/yr the cost of maintaining some realtime blacklist as a filter, or the costs of temporarily storing the messages before deletion, or something else entirely? What is that cost like compared to the overall volume of the business, is it a blip on the radar? I really am interested in knowing exactly in which ways this is costing real people money, aside from the “lost time” arguments, which are tough to really pin down with any sort of accuracy. The problem with SPAM tends to go under the rador of other people. For small business it can be devistating against the computer/IT budget. Trying to filter, having to back up shit that your employees leave in their email, to the POTENTIAL (yes the potential) for some women with her panties squeezed up her ass so tight that if she walked by a guy’s cube and he accidentally clicked on some porn link, she would be ready to sue the company for millions for sexual harassment. Where I worked as an IT manager, they’d have to be a stupid ass woman to do something like that…um, it’s construction. If you are that offended by an off color joke you’d last about 2 weeks and you’d be off looking for work at Focus on the Family. There aren’t any accurate figures on what a company spends on keeping spam off company computer systems but CNet has some articles on SPAM and why it’s an evil that you can look up if you so choose. Keep in mind that SPAM is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to email and employees. You are constantly on the look out for viruses, getting on a 'sposedly legit email list can also expose you to viruses. Email is probably the most single bandwidth hog in any commercial situation. More email gets passes around than employees fucking around on the internet. Email from friends, coworkers and businesses take up a lot of bandwidth. Add in SPAM and you have yourself dealing with ways to keep those employees happy and keeping your company’s email working without too much issue. Yes, IT managers have a lot more to deal with but the last thing you need to do is worry about such an evil and yes to me it is evil thing as SPAM. It costs money for unwanted email. Unwanted snail mail is another issue entirely as it costs them money and not me or my clients. Email SPAMmers can spend as little as $40 on software and hit a million or more addresses in a matter of seconds. Snail mail spam costs printing and postage along with photos, stock photos, someone to do the layout, etc…I find my snail mail to be less intrusive as while I walk back from my mail box I sort the good from the bad and in one hand is the File 13 mail and the other with the stuff I want to read though. Not something easily done on the internet. ---
**Author:** ![hajario](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hajario/32/171_2.png) [@hajario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hajario)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 3:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/87 "2003-08-07T03:51:46Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by techchick68 \* > \*\* Snail mail spam costs printing and postage along with photos, stock photos, someone to do the layout, etc…I find my snail mail to be less intrusive as while I walk back from my mail box I sort the good from the bad and in one hand is the File 13 mail and the other with the stuff I want to read though. Not something easily done on the internet. \*\* The main thing about snail junk mail is that they subsidize the regular mail. Yes, they pay less per piece but they have to presort it which saves the post office a ton of money. The post office makes more margin off of junk mail than regular mail so this particular annoyance saves us money. If my ISP got, say, one tenth of a cent for each piece of SPAM they recieved and had to process and I ended up paying, say, $5.00 less per month for my internet, I wouldn’t mind nearly as much. Haj ---
**Author:** ![fluiddruid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/c2a13f/32.png) [@fluiddruid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/fluiddruid)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 4:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/88 "2003-08-07T04:09:42Z")
Personally, I find that spam would be a lot less objectionable if it was, at least, regulated. I won’t say it doesn’t have a right to exist, but as it currently stands, it IS costing consumers and businesses money, and there’s really no way to stop it. I don’t want vile bestiality porn ads in my inbox, but I have no way to stop this from occurring. Why is this fair, **Rexdart**? Sure, I choose to have e-mail. I also choose to have a cell phone, and it sure isn’t okay to be barraged with sales calls when it’s costing me money, as spam is. Wjat if spam was regulated such that there was the equivalent of the “do not call” list, or if spam based businesses were forced to have a legitimate means to allow people to remove themselves from their spam lists (without getting more spam from other sources)? I would find that pretty fair, along with the caveat that misleading message titles should be prohibited. If spammers wanted to be a legitimate business, they wouldn’t resort to the tactics they do and would have already adopted the above, but yet they choose to be misleading and destructive. This should be stopped. ---
**Author:** ![hansel](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/6bbea6/32.png) [@hansel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hansel)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 4:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/89 "2003-08-07T04:28:36Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by RexDart \* > **Point is, $2700 may in fact be a pretty trivial cost compared to the overall expenditures of that company.** I double dog dare you to sit in front of the president of the company and utter that remark. God, Masao would have you in his office for days reaming you. You’re right, it is about a tenth of the salary of one low-level employee. You’re also missing the point: any incremental cost that doesn’t bring a greater return is an unnecessary expense. It seems irrelevant to you because you don’t go through budgeting every year; you don’t prepare cost analyses. From a business perspective, having the government legislate the problem away, or further away, is far preferable to adding another expense to the books. And remember, that’s a very conservative figure. Here’s another thing about business in general: the enemy is incremental costs, not white elephant programs or useless middle managers (neither of which are frequent). The greatest combined expense to any business is incremental expenses, each one of which seemed trivial at the time, but collectively are a money pit. Besides, I notice you also avoided my point about stealing a million dollars a penny at a time. ---
**Author:** ![Mojo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Mojo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mojo)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 4:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/90 "2003-08-07T04:30:19Z")
Let me get this straight- I should disable HTML in e-mails, install filtering software (potentially blocking friend’s/associate’s e-mails), change my addy because [myfirstname@isp.com](mailto:myfirstname@isp.com) is too easy to harvest, spend some money on it in hopes that it’s a “trivial” amount, and continue to spend 10 minutes every day deleting messages from people who keep on sending me crap even when I insist that I **don’t** want it, all so I might get a dollar off at Pizza Hut? BTW, In the time it took to read this thread and write this I got three more spam e-mails (“Cumdrinking Makes These Sluts Hornier…”, “Fastest Growing Opport **i** nity In USA Today”, and something about videogames that seems legit but really has something to do with “lobsidedmathprinciples” according to the URL). ---
**Author:** ![LudditeAndroid](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/8baadc/32.png) [@LudditeAndroid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LudditeAndroid)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 4:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/91 "2003-08-07T04:37:41Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by RexDart \* > \*\* And what is the total size of the US economy? Does the $8.9 billion of **LudditeAndroid** ’s cite even make a dent on it? \*\* $8.9 billion is $8.9 BILLION regardless of the GNP. That’s $8.9 Billion that could have meant better pay and less pink slips for the employees of several companies and lower prices for the consumers of those companies’ products and services. Now go ahead and say “Yeah but spammers provide a service”. It’s an UNSOLICITED service, and an inefficient one at that (they have to bother hundreds of unwilling people to get one sale). ---
**Author:** ![jackelope](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a6a055/32.png) [@jackelope](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackelope)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/92 "2003-08-07T04:43:46Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by RexDart \* > **So your company spends $2700 per year over a 5 year period to fight spam. Maybe that _is_ a trivial cost. I mean, that’s probably about one tenth the salary of a common employee, not even considering the expense of any benefits package. That means the company will be spending ten times their spam-fighting expense just paying a single employee.** Dude, you have GOT to be jerking our chains with this one. _The company did not ask for this._ It’s as if I were to walk down the street, spy a business, and decide to do something totally unrequested and unstoppable that would cost them $2700 a year. For instance vandalizing their walls every night so they’d have to clean it off every day, with the difference that _it wouldn’t even be illegal_. You think they should _just fucking take it_? “It’s a trivial cost, so quit whining, bitch?” How much does a hit of crack go for these days? ---
**Author:** ![jackelope](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/a6a055/32.png) [@jackelope](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackelope)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 4:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/93 "2003-08-07T04:47:18Z")
(By the way, five pieces of spam came into my mailbox while I was writing that.) ---
**Author:** ![Mama\_Tiger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/6de8d8/32.png) [@Mama\_Tiger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mama_Tiger)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 5:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/94 "2003-08-07T05:46:10Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by RexDart \* > \*\*What pipe-dream office do you work in? Employees use email to read and forward glurge to their friends and family. Employees use the internet to screw around on company time. That’s what internet access is used for in the working world. I’m talking about a law office, and I guarantee you that nearly every person in that office used email as the primary form of communication and document transmittal between our office and ALL our clients all over the world. I also personally spent several hours a day researching various issues online because that was the fastest and easiest way to find the necessary information. Apparently you haven’t ever grasped the concept that many people actually use the internet as a valuable work resource and not just a playground to annoy the shit out of other people. Also unlike you, my employers knew that I’d use my internet access for WORK and only screw around during my lunch hour, which is what I did. Maybe someday if you achieve a level of competency in a field, your employers will trust you to know how to work during working hours, too. But judging by your abysmal lack of knowledge about how even the most basic office functions occur, I’m not betting the rent on the chance of that happening any time soon. ---
**Author:** ![whatami](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/85f322/32.png) [@whatami](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/whatami)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 5:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/95 "2003-08-07T05:52:32Z")
> [@](#): > > _Originally posted by RexDart_ > So your company spends $2700 per year over a 5 year period to fight spam. Maybe that is a trivial cost. I mean, that’s probably about one tenth the salary of a common employee, not even considering the expense of any benefits package. That means the company will be spending ten times their spam-fighting expense just paying a single employee. You have got to be fucking kidding me. Why don’t you go out and work in the real world for a little bit. Companies right now are watching every single cent that goes out. Shit, if we’re printing something for reference only at work, and not for file we have to print on the other side of a used piece of paper. No shit! From some of your posts it seems that maybe you’re in school. Why don’t you wait untill you know what you’re about instead of talking out your ass. ---
**Author:** ![Aslan\_of\_Narnia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecd19e/32.png) [@Aslan\_of\_Narnia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Aslan_of_Narnia)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 5:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/96 "2003-08-07T05:54:06Z")
Not related to the OP… But since you’re also from SA. RexDart, is the :tenbux: you spend to buy the account worth it, in your opinion? How many more forums become avaliable when you sign up? The main detractor for me with going ahead with buying an actual account is all the massive bandwagons SA has, and the fear of breaking some obscure clause that causes you to get insta-banned with no warning. ---
**Author:** ![rjung](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/45deac/32.png) [@rjung](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rjung)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 6:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/97 "2003-08-07T06:37:24Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by RexDart \* > I don’t know what else I’m supposed to say At this point, how about “I’m sorry for being a fuckin’ clueless dimbulb”? (Hey, it’s the Pit, I’m allowed) _Anecdote:_ Just for giggles, I decided to keep all the spam email I received in one week just to see how much I’d get. 7 days of spam: 260+ pieces of mail. 7 days of non-spam: 35 pieces of mail. Just because you don’t think it’s a nuisance doesn’t mean the rest of the world must agree. ---
**Author:** ![Mockingbird](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/c68b51/32.png) [@Mockingbird](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mockingbird)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 7:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/98 "2003-08-07T07:06:16Z")
The spam catcher in Eudora 6 has captured 765 e-mails in the past four days. I just had to fix my boss’ spam blocker because he had 20 GB that had accumulated in the past two weeks. _That_ is a problem. ---
**Author:** ![Eternal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/ecb155/32.png) [@Eternal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eternal)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 7:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/99 "2003-08-07T07:29:33Z")
No doubt it’s annoying but the really interesting question is why there’s been so much news coverage about the government’s actions to stop it. Was this a massive blitz effort by those companies that would save moeny by not having to process spam, or was it in fact the government setting the foundation on which a new anti-Intenet-privacy campaign? Choose one or the other! BETTING ENDS! ---
**Author:** ![biqu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7feea3/32.png) [@biqu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/biqu)\ **Post date:** [August 7, 2003, 10:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255/100 "2003-08-07T10:20:24Z")
> [@](#): > > _Originally posted by neutron star_ > Huh? > > Not only does that not even mention backup, but it’s not even correct! Webmail services store the email on their servers. Unless the user copies and pastes his email to his hard drive or something, the spam isn’t even on his drive. Of course, that’s not true with regular POP3 boxes, as the default setting for clients is to delete mail from the server the first time they download it; it’s then moved immediately to their hard drives. Try again; here’s the quote by **D\_Odds** : > [@](#): > > When you’re Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail or AOL Mail, all that spam is residing on your harddrive and it’s a problem. The pronoun _you_ in this sentence refers to Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, or AOL Mail, who you admit store their users’ mail on their servers. And since these services presumably do backups on their servers, I would say that **D\_Odds** did mention, indirectly, the cost of backup that you explicitly introduced into the thread. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255.md?page=4) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-so-horribly-evil-about-spam-email/193255.md?page=6)