Re: [Asrg] SMTP over SSL

["Eric S. Imsand" <eimsandasrg@charter.net>]

I agree that what you're saying is certainly possible... if someone making
$500,000 /yr. goes on a crusade for half the day, then the figures could
be artificially inflated.

That having been said, I respectfully disagree.  I have purposefully not
installed spam filters on the server I run, so that I can collect raw data
for some research that I will (someday) do.  I currently receive, on average,
about 50 pieces of spam mail a day, and it takes me about 1-2 minutes to
clean it out.  If you assume that everyone in the company I work for takes
a similar amount of time (a reasonable assumption, I believe), then I do
not believe that the cost comes from people spending time cleaning out there
inboxes.

I don't have the spam statistics sitting by my side, but if we assume that
each spam message takes 500 bytes - 1Kbyte, and each employee receives 50
spams a day, that is between 25-50Kbytes of space eaten up by spam, per day.
 The company I work for employs 20 people, so that's roughly 500 Kbytes -
1Mbyte per day devoted to spam storage.  Now, make a couple of reasonable
assumptions: first, assume that not everyone is conscious about emptying
their trash (I have seem employees let their trash folders grow to be 50
Mbytes).  Second, assume that, instead of 20 people, this company employs
200 people.  Clearly, the numbers can get quite big in a hurry.

***NOTE: we purposefully do not place limits on employees mailbox sizes.
 Executive decision made by someone with more authority than I have

I realize that I've done a lot of fuzzy math here, but that's beside the
point.  It's not difficult to imagine this becoming a problem for an organization
with thousands of mailboxes.  Furthermore, since most companies/ISP's do
not actively block or reject e-mail (most move it to a spam folder, modify
the subject line, etc.), the disk space and CPU cycles are still spent.

Eric

Vernon Schryver wrote:
> > From: "Eric S. Imsand" <eimsandasrg@charter.net>
> >   
>
> > According to the post by Paul Judge ("ASRG Meeting 
> > Minutes"), some organizations are estimating $1-$2 per 
> > piece of spam that gets through filters... that certainly 
> > is not .05 / month.
> >   
>
> I wasn't at the meeting, but I'm certain that $1-$2/spam has nothing
> to do with CPU cycles, disk space, network bandwidth or anything else
> done by computers.  It is the lost productivity or similar costs of
> having your most expensive employees (those who get the most spam)
> "just hit delete" or (worse) get angry and go on a crusade.
>
>
> Vernon Schryver    vjs@rhyolite.com
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