Re: Spam Cop

From: Jim Reardon <jim_at_amusive.com>
Date: Mon 17 Mar 2003 08:23:09 -0600

On Fri 14 Mar 2003 12:30:18 -0600, Josh Dahmes wrote:
>To that I answer... oh really? How much does it cost a homeowner
>to pay for garbage pick up? How much does it cost tax payers to
>maintain garbage dumps?

I pay a flat fee for garbage pickup. Adding junk mail into it does
not cost me a penny.

Bandwidth is not measured in the same way. An ISP pays per byte,
period. Every extra byte costs extra money. Most people do not
realize this because it does not effect the typical end user, they
are in the "I pay $20 a month for my internet no matter how much I
use it" mindset.

This is *NOT* how things work.

I pay a flat charge per gigabyte of transfer to and from my server.
When a spammer sends me a UCE, it costs me REAL money that comes out
of my pocket. Spam coming to my server typically uses in the range
of gigabytes of traffic which in turn costs me several dollars
monthly.

"Several dollars" isn't huge, but it's complete horse manure that I
PAY several dollars a month to be annoyed.

UCE is exactly equivalent to a telemarketer calling collect -- and
you can't refuse the charges.

Beyond that, spammers have a new sleezy marketing tactic -- they'll
connect to a mail server from a domain and fire off mails to any
possible thing that could go before the @domain.com. My server
doesn't handle a huge amount of traffic but in one particuarly busy
day this happened to all my domains -- they attempted to send
2,500,000 emails to accounts that did not exist.

2,500,000 in one day!

The amount of overhead that puts on a server is large. Also, since
the domains they did this against only had ~3-5 aliases each...
roughly 100 mails actually got through. 2,500,000 connections to
send 100 mails.
---
Jim Reardon <jim_at_amusive.com>
http://www.amusive.com/






Received on Mon Mar 17 2003 - 08:23:09 CST