Originally Posted by punkworld

Spamming is probably the worst form of destruction of capital online.

I believe the average person who works with computers spends about 5 minutes a day looking through and deleting spam. Now, that doesn't seem like a lot, does it?

Let's say there are about 50 million people in the US working with computers (a fairly realistic, maybe even low estimate). In that case, spam costs ~4.2 million work hours a day. At an average of $15 per hour, that's $62,500,000 per day.
Assuming an average of a 5 day work week and 48 weeks of work a year, email spamming adds up to an economic damage of about $15 billion a year in the US alone.

And that's just a small part of the damage spam does. It also has direct effects like diminished consumer trust regarding the internet, actually scaring people away from the internet, etc. The internet as a business tool has been greatly damaged by spam and crap like it.