Subject: Re: spam

From: "John Loughney" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 08:34:15 +0000

Hi all,

Costly-ness can be factor of jurisdiction. Many places in the world do not have access to broadband. For many, receiving spam is both a monetary expense & a time expense. Also, when the ratio of spam vs. valid mail become high, the utility of email shrinks.

John 
Theodore writes:

> It's a lot more costly than time just to
> "hit delete".  It's the time to determine
> whether it's spam, or something valuable,
> since the cost of accidentally deleting something
> valuable can be very, very costly indeed.

That requires only a fraction of a second for me.

> It's the cost to download mail. 

Here again, only a fraction of a second.

> I'm currently travelling in Wales, and my
> internet access is (a) slow, and (b) expensive.

I'm at home, and my access is (a) fast and (b) cheap.

The argument of costliness just doesn't hold water.

---

From: "Anthony Atkielski" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 09:17:33 +0200

John writes:

> Many places in the world do not have access to
> broadband. For many, receiving spam is both a
> monetary expense & a time expense.

What percentage of their bandwidth is consumed by spam, and is this
bandwidth fully utilized?

> Also, when the ratio of spam vs. valid mail become
> high, the utility of email shrinks.

But when spam filters throw away legitimate e-mail, the utility of e-mail
shrinks even further.

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 06:37:51 -0400

> bandwidth fully utilized?

If you're being billed per megabyte or minute, and connected at modem speeds,
the answer doesn't really matter.   It's costing you (even if only in
people time), and installing a bigger pipe isn't an option either.

You might want to learn a bit about queuing theory also - like why you can be
dropping packets due to congestion and similar nasties when you're only
using 70% of the bandwidth.  Just because it's not clogging ALL the
bandwidth doesn't mean it's not a problem.