Re: opt-out registry comments

On 01 Aug 2011, at 7:01 PM, andre wrote:
> No. Spammers are low life common law thieving criminals. Whether they
> are stealing 1c or R10 makes no diffirence. Steal 1c from 1 million people
> and it becomes R10 000 - If 1000 people steal 1c once per day for a year
> all of a sudden it becomes a R3 650 000 000 (R3 Billion rand) industry.

We need separate what the ISP's benefit from SPAM (i.e. additional bandwidth revenues), and how the spammer actually benefits. So although the spammer is costing you additional bandwidth, this money that is being "stolen" goes to the ISP. The spammer only benefits by the people that buy the service/product he has spammed about.
I think what Bretton was trying to point out is that spamming exists because it is a cost effective means to market certain products, not because the spammers are "stealing" bandwidth from you. Besides this argument becomes more moot as the cost of bandwidth decreases, while the irritation persists or gets worse. So if you have an uncapped account, the spam does not cost you more than if you didn't receive it, yet the irritation is still there.

I have to agree with Graham and say that the the biggest impact is time consumed. Either my spam filtering is extremely effective, or I need to review my hourly rate, because if I billed out the time I spent on reading spam for an entire year, I could probably only buy a couple of beers.



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