That incident did bring to my attention a couple particular usenet groups (which I shall not name), where I visited, witnessed what were IMHO ridiculous demonizations of spammers and endorsements of ludicrous anti-spam tactics that prompted me to make the query in my post. So it wasn’t precisely that incident upon which my discussion was predicated, but that brought the spam and anti-spam issue more clearly to my attention. (Because, as you can see from my posts, I never really considered spam to be much more than a minor annoyance, and could not take the words of the anti-spam zealots as proof of anything.)
I figured the appropriate place for discussing that in any specific context to be their message board and those Usenet groups. The general issues involved, however, are not specific to any single internet company or group, and were IMHO fit for discussion here. I do not import “drama” from other communities here, but when I see a general issue raised elsewhere, I assume it’s OK to raise the issue here to see what people think.
I mention this all only to provide some context for my OP and subsequent posts, to explain why I knew certain things about anti-spam tactics (by reading about them from sysadmins on Usenet) but not as much about office computing in general. (This is for the guy on the first page who suspected I was considering entering the spamming business.)
I don’t know what else I’m supposed to say, but I’ll add a few paragraphs here. Spam is no more than a minor annoyance to me, and if there are people out there who claim to require a full 20 minutes to delete their daily spam, I don’t know what they’re doing wrong. You could get 300 spam email per day and still delete them in far less time than that, and there are email readers that delete mail faster, try one. You all can naysay the junk mail analogy, but part of my job at that office that summer was to sort through the snailmail every single day (and the P.O. Box once a week), and that cost me time as well, but nobody proposes we outlaw junk mail due to the time imposition. It’s part of the accepted cost of having a mailbox (and most important stuff was sent and received through FedEx, which I also handled, where there is no junk mail, so there are options.)
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. Until (and unless) the revised UCC Article 2 passes this summer, you can’t even use electronic signatures in sales in some jurisdictions. If you choose to use email, why not just accept certain drawbacks as part of the cost, compare them to the benefits, and make a decision? If you choose to travel by plane, you accept a certain cost in wasted time passing through these intrusive and unwanted checkpoints. Everything has certain costs associated with its use.
But look, I understand from the reactions of people on here that spam really bothers them. I’m willing to just concede that for some people it imposes a cost, you’ve got cites from some impartial sources, and that is part of what I wanted to get here. I suspect that where an IT person would be most likely to complain about the cost of spam, people in other departments would probably find other costs and tasks to be equally problematic. I guess, in light of that, I was thinking of spam from the perspective of an average, non-IT, internet user. If your job centers around these issues, I concede that you may find it to be a primary problem.
I’ll put a dollar figure on it, even: $6,000, plus $1,500/year. That’s the cost of one spam filtering solution for the company where I manage the I.S. department.
We run our own mail server. One of our domain names got onto some lists, and for a period of year, everyone was getting 10-20 pieces of often-pornographic spam per day. We eventually got everyone switched over to a new domain name, which cut the problem way down, but it’s creeping up again. So there’s the cost of reprinting everyone’s business cards. And our catalogue, so add another $10,000 to the figure I mentioned above.
Now tell me that the costs of spam aren’t noticeable.
Look at it this way, Rexdart: if I steal a penny from 100 million bank accounts, I’ve stolen $1,000,000. The cost to everyone is so tiny that the vast majority will never notice it, and for those who do, the vast majority won’t care, in real financial terms. So have I really stolen $1,000,000? How can you say that I’ve hurt anyone, when the amount of individual injury is so tiny?
I say that I’m guilty of the theft of $1,000,000, and should be punished for it just as if I had taken it from one room in one bank.
There’s more to deleting spam than simply clicking 300 check boxes, you know. Unless the only mail you expect to get is spam, you have to spend some time determining whether each message is spam.
Many are obvious, of course. But when you see a message from John Smith with a subject “The information you requested”, is it spam? What if you actually requested information from someone recently? John Smith could be the person at the company in charge of answering your request. So you have to open it, read it, then delete it.
How about the subject “Your web site www.yourdomain.com”? Could be spam, could be a user who found an error on your site. “I found your address”? Could be spam, could be someone from high school whose name doesn’t quite ring a bell. So you open the messages, read them, then delete them. Repeat 10 to 100 times daily.
Faxes get spam too. I’ve had to sort through 50 spam messages a day to get legitimate contracts that needed immediate attention. Lord help me if I threw one of those into the recycling bin. As for actual cost of business, aside from accidently throwing away necessary documents, it costs the company paper, toner, and electricity.
Telephones get spam. They’re called telemarketers.
Real mail gets spam. They’re called junk mail.
Receptionists get spam. They’re called solicitors.
There’s spam everywhere. But simply telling us we have to weigh the costs of using it against the drawbacks aren’t even an option. Not in the slightest.
People need phones.
People need mail.
People need faxes.
people need entrances to businesses.
people need e-mail.
It’s as simple as that. There’s no cost or benefit analysis here. You need them to stay operational.
But there’s another thing you still don’t seem to get. In fact, I’m quite willing to admit that I didn’t even get it until I read through this thread (yes, this thread has helped me fight ignorance). Ignore the fact that people checking e-mail and deleting spam takes a large amount of time and productivity. Just throw that argument right out.
The IPs that filter 40 to 50% of the mail and require that much extra server space to filter it pass the cost onto me, the consumer.
Spam costs me, the consumer, an increase of 40-50% in my monthly e-mail bills.
Spam costs businesses that much too. They, in turn, pass that cost onto me, the consumer.
There’s your spam costs. That’s why it’s evil. It costs me money.
Well, if I was actually paying per piece of mail, and not simply a flat fee for the PO Box that included both real and junk mail, then I would examine the actual cost in proportion to the total amount of business I did, and if it was significant then I would balance the costs versus the benefits. If the costs were significant and the benefits few, then I might consider getting rid of the PO Box, and doing all business via FedEx.
But of course, we see in junk mail an example of mass-marketing that can often be useful and welcome. As I said before, I welcome the coupons I get every other week or so in my mail, for my favorite pizza places and restaurants. It seems that when people are complaining about spam email, they often complain about the content of those emails as part of their argument. Note the numerous mentions of the penile enlargement, pornography, and mortgage refinancing offers. (BTW, one kind of spam that I wholeheartedly object to is the Nigerian scam and its variants, as that constitutes wire fraud – my professor for White Collar Crime read aloud two examples of that email he received during the semester, and those really are illegal, and I would welcome their perpetrators being shut down.)
But envision a world where spam emails were used to advertise products you might want, to give out e-coupons for products you buy, things like that. Or in a corporate setting, spam email might offer low cost temp services, or sales on electronic equipment, or a list of the sales specials at Office Depot this week. Might we agree then that spam would be significantly less distasteful to you and others here if the content of it were different? So then is the problem really the existence of spam, or the uses towards which it is presently being put?
Well, I think you have a point here. Still, you could probably cut down on the time quite a bit by disabling HTML in emails and/or switching to purely text-based email readers, as they take almost no time at all to load a message and you can tell right away from there. Myself, when I used to get spam on my old hotmail addy, I just looked at the address of the sender and deleted anything that wasn’t clearly from somebody I know, or from a legitimate organization (the university, for instance.) I haven’t used it yet, but on my yahoo email account there’s an option to only receive mail from people you specify, and I suppose it would be possible to use something like that and just add any contacts you make to the list of acceptable emailers. Then spam wouldn’t even be a minor annoyance for the regular schmoe with an email account, we would never receive a piece of it if we didn’t want to.
Just speaking for myself, I would still be just as pissed. I don’t want any advertisments in my e-mail. Or over my telephone. Or in my mailbox. Or on my doorstep. I support the criminalization of all four above mentioned forms of advertising.
Envision a world where every single company, from the one-person sole proprietorship to the huge multinational corporation, decides that YOU need to know about their products and e-coupons. Imagine your computer hard drive melting down as you literally recieve thousands or even millions of emails every day.
This is the problem with spam. There is no, or very minimal, cost to the “business” to send it. Even if you currently pay a flat fee for your internet access, someone, somewhere is paying for that bandwidth. There is no free lunch – someone pays – and whether you admit it or not, that person is ultimately you. Every year the spam problem gets worse and worse. As more and more companies decide to resort to those kinds of tactics, there is going to be more and more strain on the infrastructure, in terms of computer resources and manpower to deal with and maintain it.
The spam-haters are being proactive. They are trying to make spam unprofitable or even illegal now before a host of greedy, short sighted “businesses” drag down the whole damn internet with their garbage.
The longer the email system exists in its current form, the worse the problem is going to get, and as long as it’s profitable and cost-effective the spam is just going to get worse.
I am not sure what’s so hard to grok about that. It’s not as simple as just hitting delete. You have to look beyond your own desk.
See, I don’t think you quite understand the concept of what spam is, Rexdart. It’s unsolicited commercial email. That means I didn’t ask for it and I don’t want it. If I wanted e-coupons, I’d ask for them.
You also wouldn’t receive that email from that long-forgotten hot blonde from high school who tracked down your email address. You couldn’t get an email from a Doper who wanted to respond privately to your thread. Or, hell, even a warning or something from an SDMB administrator or mod, unless you had them all specified in your Yahoo account.
I manage a network of ~40 users. Another cost not mentioned in this thread is that of backing up email. See, many users don’t delete their spam. They just skip over it to the important messages. The owner of our company has 1.8 gigabytes of email on her computer to back up. Much of it is spam. Hell, a lot of it is really sick spam - child porn and incest shit. I wonder what that 50-year old woman thinks when she has to see nasty crap like that every fucking day of the week. Hell, my grandma has an email address. I wonder what she thinks. Anyway, backups take time and storage space, both of which increase as spam increases. Hence, costs increase.
As for users goofing off when given Internet access, well, let’s just say I’ve seen the proof that most of them don’t. Of course there will always be a few bad apples, but the vast majority of our employees are using the web for mostly work-related matters. Our router keeps track of all of the websites users visit. I’ve seen the logs. Unless their idea of fun is browsing and ordering from Grainger, I don’t think they’re goofing off.
(Sorry, it’s tough keeping track of every post in this thread, when I’ve ended up with every one of them directed at me, that’ll learn me to be a lone voice on anything around here without budgeting the time for it )
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.
Ever heard the famous quote “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”? SOMEone is paying for all those terrabytes of spam that are sitting on servers waiting to be delivered. It ain’t the spammers and businesses pass costs on to consumers.
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No. We might not.
ANY form of advertising that imposes it’s costs on me is unwelcome and should be illegal. I don’t care whether it’s spam e-mail, spam phone calls, or spam anything else. If I paying the costs, it’s theft, pure and simple
I’m going out of the country for 3-4 weeks later in the year. I will not be able to access my e-mail during that time. I get between 40 and 70 e-mails that slip through my spam filter (I’m not willing to make an “opt-in” filter that only lets known friends through; people contact me via a website I set up and I don’t want to block them–and while I block domains, I can’t block random strings of characters) and the spam mail is getting bigger. I got a 350K spam today. That’s not a ton, but it adds up.
My mailbox will fill up and legitmate e-mails will be bounced because there’s no law to stop storage space thieves from stealing my property.
You don’t like the junk mail analogy? Let’s try a better one. Someone distributes keys to your house to thouands of winos. The winos come in whenever they want and they hang out there. If you want to let company into your home, you have to chase out the winos first. But worse, the winos and the real guests mingle but there’s 20 winos to every one guest. And they dress alike.
If I’m paying for it, it’s my goddamned bandwidth and storage space, not the spammers.
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