I want to clear up exactly what my opinions are, because everyone here seems so sure I must be “trolling”.
Having recently encountered some system admins on the net that held what I thought to be an overzealous and exaggerated view of the alleged “evils” of spam, I decided to post here my own opinion and see whether others agreed with me and found it a minor annoyance, or whether they found it to be more than that, and why. That’s no more trolling than posting an IMHO thread is trolling, and since it represented my actual sentiments and opinion towards spam, and I wanted a debate with the availability of naughty words, to the Pit I went. But if you perhaps think I should rather have posted to IMHO, maybe that would have been a more prudent course of action.
You’ll note that in my OP I never said anything to the effect of “w00t! sp4m rulezzz!” I merely proposed that perhaps it wasn’t “so bad” as many people thought. The cites provided in this thread have demonstrated that it does indeed have a cost associated with it. That cost is apparently very minor in comparison to the total economy or to the total expenditures of any single company. It was pointed out that even minor expenditures are important to eliminate when they produce nothing in return, and I agree on that point but note that while the net total of all those minor expenses is noticeable and one may therefore reasonably adopt a policy of opposing each and every one of them, no single one of them makes or breaks a company. In other words, $2700/yr isn’t going to make or break a company, but in conjunction with other unnecessary expenses, it get’s to be a real hassle, right?
Now, if it is your department facing one of these unnecessary costs, you would very much wish to see it go away, and would attach an extra importance to it. In another department, you might be infuriated by some unnecessary government red tape or permit applications you had to hire legal work for that ended up costing you as much as the IT guys had to spend fighting spam, and you’d be highly concerned with that. It would be quite important to you, and in the aggregate along with all the other departments’ unneeded expenses it would be important to the company as a whole. But if you went around trumpeting that particular bit of red tape as a national plague, people would be understandably underwhelmed.
If what you all want to say is that spam costs businesses money, then I’d be forced to agree from the cites and anecdotes provided. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s an extremely tiny expense in comparison to an entire company’s expenditures and to the size of the national economy, so why should it command so much attention? Surely then, economic arguments don’t merit giving spam much more attention than we give the zillions of other wastes of money business engage in on a daily basis.
If the complaints about it are based on the “flick” cumulative annoyance factor, then I guess it’s up to you to decide what you find annoying enough to demand sweeping regulations and countermeasures against. I have found it rather easy to avoid large quantities of annoying spam, and deal with it quickly and easily if I couldn’t, but apparently this is not the case for some of you. So be it.
Either way, I see no point in continuing to argue about it, so consider this thread over, at least as to my involvement in it. You are free to continue the discussion without me, let the thread die, or to close the thread. I responded to posts directed almost solely at me for over 2 days now, and provided this summary of my conclusions, so I think I’ve done all I’m obligated to do in this thread.
