Originally Posted by RawAlex

Verisexy: The problem is that most people around here just don't understand the scale of the problem. Millions of dollars spent each year by companies to maintain mail servers, delete spam, trap out viruses, and so on is all "so much nothing" to these people. Their answer always is "just delete it, it only takes a second". They don't understand for a second that each of those seconds adds up to a ton of time. The expense of having larger net connections than you need, bigger mail servers (50-75% bigger than needed normally), and people spending time to create new rules to trap out spam is all lost money. The huge amount of employee time wasted on this stuff is beyond all imagination.

d00t, it all comes down to costs to the sender and costs to the receiver. Buy an ad in the newspaper, and the receiver gets it for free (included with the news he wanted). Telemarketters pay employees, phone lines, and all that stuff, plus they are heavily regulated on times, do not call lists, etc, and to the receiver, the only cost is the time - the phone line was a given. Send it by mail, the receiver gets it for free... but the sender is paying by the piece. Circulars, weekly papers, etc... they all cost the sender, not the receiver, except for the time to handle them. In all of these cases, the costs to DELIVER the message are significant to the sender. (direct mail USPS rates run about 20-30 cents per piece, I am sure that there is a good price break for big numbers... but a million pieces a day will still run you $100k a day... plus printing and stuff)

Email spam is the reverse. spammers get a server, a line, cue up their stuff and spew email out like incontenent monkeys. The cost per piece is negligible (send a few million a day, for a month, from a server costing maybe 1k... the costs are insanely low). The receiver had to spend money for internet connection, computer, etc, plus has to manually and personally handle each piece of mail. The cost to the reciever is HIGHER than that of the sender - and that is where the problem really is.

Fax spam has basically been outlawed in the US because of the costs the receiver has to incur to recieve the message.

At even 30 million messages a month, this guy would generate HUGE losses and costs all around. At the numbers he was talking... well, the expenses are insane.

Spammers must learn that their actions are no longer welcome.

Alex