AnarchoCyphertopian technologies (wasRE:[extropy-chat]Reccommendations for a mailing list)

[Dan Clemmensen]

Mike Lorrey wrote:

>--- Dan Clemmensen <dgc at cox.net> wrote:
>  
>
>>Much less than that. Bandwidth cost is nearly zero percent of your
>>cable connection cost to your provider, and e-mail is nearly zero
>>percent of your bandwidth usage. Compared to even one small photo on
>>a web page, a  spam message is insignificant.
>>    
>>
>
>  
>
Mike, I agree that spam is bad, and I would like to apply some form of
retroactive birth control to spammers. I loathe them. But you are mistakenly
focusing on the wrong parts of the problem, which means you are not
focusing on the right parts.

The fundamental danger to society is that spam is polluting the commons
and ruining the e-mail experience for customers. This in turn will drive
customers away from e-mail, which in turn inhibits the flow of information.
And oh by the way, reduced the revenues of entities like Yahoo that have
found legitimate ways to make money by providing e-mail service.

By polluting the information commons and inhibiting information flow,
Spammers act as a drag on intellectual progress.

>Spam messages today typically contain one or more graphics, if you
>haven't noticed. This is done as a means of verifying that the email
>address is active. Size is typically around 20k.
>  
>
Those pictures are not being stored on the e-mail disks. If they were they
wold not serve the purpose you mention. Furthermore anyone with any
sense turns off automatic download, so they are not part of the 
bandwidth problem
either.

>One or two spam messages is insignificant. 200 spam messages a day, 365
>days a year, per each one of 40 million customers, that is over 140
>billion spam messages a year.
>
>Assuming the average customer checks their email once every week, this
>means the average daily disk load is 53 terabytes. This is not small
>potatos. This is 160 terabytes of RAID space needed to maintain space
>for spam. This is also a bandwidth load of 350 megabits per second.
>Also not small potatos.
>  
>
Sorry, Mike. the aggregate is still trivial, and it's still less that a 
dollar per user
for the disk space. Long-haul bandwidth process are still falling, so 
the only real
cost is in the local loop.This means the biggest hit is on the 
individual end customer's
local bandwidth.

>Add in real estate, network infrastructure, personnel to maintain all
>of this, you are talking an extremely significant cost of doing
>business that spammers impose on companies that provide email space to
>recipients of spam.
>
>  
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All paid for by the $1.00 per customer.