Spam costs. RE: [Asrg] SMTP over SSL

["Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <pbaker@verisign.com>]

Well ingoring the fact that I have been working on killing spam which means I could attribute much of the cost of emplying me to spam I see the following costs of spam:

 

1) It takes a lot longer to identify the wanted messages on my RIM pager.

 

2) A lot of uses of my mail system are slow because I am wading through spam.

 

3) Most of the spam is simply never read, but some is because it takes a while to check.

 

4) I frequently loose wanted messages amongst the noise.

 

I don't think that these add up to $1 per spam but it is a non-negligible amount.

 

The total enterprise costs are somewhat different, here we have to take account of the pinhead factor:

 

1) People who open up malicious code

 

2) People who defraud the company hoping to pay it back from a 419 scheme (several really large frauds)

 

3) People who sue their employer claiming that pornospam created a hostile work environment

 

For ISPs the major costs are:

 

1) Customers switching to another ISP to avoid their spam

 

2) Customers discontinuing service altogether

 

3) Complaints from customers, spam victims other ISPs and anti-spam vigilantes with attitude

 

 

I don't think the cost of actually moving the stuff arround are the biggest cost for anyone, they can become a major cost for a really big ISP which has football fields worth of equipment.