Re: opt-out registry comments

On Tue, Aug 2, 2011 at 1:16 PM, Ant Brooks <[email protected]> wrote:

> 2. Bretton thinks it is challenging to illustrate just how much of
>   a problem spam is to the law-makers who draft legislation dealing
>   with this sort of thing, because the numbers indicate that it doesn't
>   actually cost that much per person.
>

It costs "a lot" but not "a huge amount". In the long run it's difficult to
illustrate the problem because it isn't really a huge problem now that
everyone has anti-spam systems, rather it's easier to look at what the
market spends on anti-spam systems - that number is "a huge amount" but no
email system exists that doesn't have some sort of anti-spam since that's
the defacto marketing strategy and a powerful one. The cost also doesn't hit
the person unless they have their MX records behind an edge they pay for.
It's also difficult to work this cost out based on what's rejected in SMTP
negotiation, content scan time or slips through the cracks as each different
scenario has different bandwidth implications and "cloud" based anti-spam
solutions have such large economies of scale that the cost is absorbed at a
single point.

Here's the problem for me: 1) There's actually less spam than people say
there is, the figures bandied around like "98% of all email" don't seem to
be factual from my investigations. 2) Spammers are annoying, but probably
don't belong in prison, and the big conflict of interest is that having them
around benefits many financially by selling products to get rid of them.

If spam went away enough you'd kill two industries with one stone, and
everyone would just be in the same position.

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