anybody else been spammed by "no-ip.com" yet?

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41

In a message written on Sat, May 04, 2002 at 04:36:40PM -0400, Scott A Crosby wrote:

So far, other than Jared Mauch <jared@puck.Nether.net>'s calculation where
he neither confirmed nor disputed $.02/email, I've yet to see *one*
quantified per-message price bandied about..

It doesn't matter.

I will suggest that as long as the cost of e-mail advertisements
is cheaper than the cost of snail mail advertisements you will get
more e-mail advertisements than snail mail ones.

Even at $0.18/message (or whatever the bulk rate is these days),
plus the cost of paper, printers, machines/people to stuff envelops
I still get 2-3 unwanted physical ads in my snail mail box every
day.

Even if spammers had to pay $0.05, $0.02, $0.0002, or whatever the
cost is determined to be you will get spam. Lots of spam. In
fact, if the spammers did have to pay it would eliminate the 'theft
of resources' argument, and I bet spam would triple as more business
consider it a legal and ethical way of doing business.

Sadly, I don't see the virtual world working any better than the
real world. The only real difference at the moment is the type of
products being sold. In the end there will be a mechanism to make
spam legal. It may be micro-payments, it may be something else;
but business will find a way to do it. Then your spam will change
from "Viagra" and "Live xxxx Girls" to "Get your Capitol 1 No Hassel
Card" and "Publishers Clearinghouse wants to award you $1 Million!"

Maybe that wouldn't be so bad, the spam would be less offensive.

42

In the immortal words of measl@mfn.org (measl@mfn.org):

>
> So we have a choice: pay for the (very nice but expensive) commercial
> product, or add forty percent to our mail spool disk farm and extra
> cpus and ram in the mail server farm to deal with the additional
> influx. In the numbers we're talking about, bandwidth costs become
> measurable too.

Whether we like it or not however, this is a cost of doing business now, and
is a normal part of determining your cost of goods sold (at least it *should*
be).

We can grit our teeth and make that statement now, when spam is
(handwave, guess, maybe) 30% of our incoming mail load.

It's going to become a lot harder to make as that percentage
approaches 99. Which it will, and probably sooner than any of us want
to think about.

Even the most naive of IT managers will, after a few rounds of
budgeting, notice that red ink is hemorrhaging from a single
line-item, and take steps to correct it.

We are rapidly approaching the point where ANY alternative to SMTP is
going to start looking _very_ attractive to the people who sign our
paychecks. When that point is reached, they will very likely grab at
the first product available that looks like it will still allow them
to communicate with a large fraction of their customers.

If we would prefer that product _not_ to be based on MSN, Passport and
Hailstorm (or whatever half-baked alternative Sun and AOL cook up), it
would behoove us to start work on an open, standardized, IETF-sanctioned
solution sooner rather than later.

Just sayin,

-n

-----------------------------------------------------------<memory@blank.org>
"`G.I. Jane' is a demeaning, violent, bloody workout video. Some brief
nudity, bad language and a false sense of human resilience. Rated R." (--CNN)
<http://blank.org/memory/&gt;\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-\-

43

We can grit our teeth and make that statement now, when spam is

    > (handwave, guess, maybe) 30% of our incoming mail load.
    >
    > It's going to become a lot harder to make as that percentage
    > approaches 99. Which it will, and probably sooner than any of us want
    > to think about.

FWIW, my mother got a new email account a two weeks ago, which I just got
around to setting her machine up to log into this afternoon. There were
817 pieces of mail in her inbox, of which seven weren't spam. That comes
to 99.14%. I'm sure that'll go down a bit as she begins to use the
account more, but I doubt it'll go down much. For it to go down to 30%,
she'd need to receive 953 pieces of valid email each week, and I'd guess
the actual number, from looking at her prior email account, is closer to
15. Which would still put us at nearly 97% spam.

                                -Bill

44

I have to say I think you're doing something wrong somewhere.. excluding
official role addresses I receive a handful (15ish?) spam mails per day
and I've been using some of my email addresses for years. A couple are
used on websites so they are published.

Perhaps to an extent I'm lucky, but I watch where I put my email address,
tend to use a different user when submitting web forms so I can filter if
necessary.. I've noticed the worst offenders for taking email addresses
and distributing them are things like search engine submits and online
games. All 'official/business' type sites seem to be responsible with
their email databases..

Steve

45

2002-04-05 | 116
2002-04-04 | 125
2002-04-03 | 91
2002-04-02 | 88
2002-04-01 | 97
(33 rows)

go ahead and "Just Hit Delete" if you want.

if this idiot idea ("the `you can delete it' one) continues on, there's
going to be a market for ultra long life, MILSPEC, DEL KEYS.