nanog mailing list archives

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


From: Scott A Crosby <crosby () qwes math cmu edu>
Date: Sat, 4 May 2002 14:48:46 -0400 (EDT)


On 4 May 2002, Robert E. Seastrom wrote:

Scott Granados <scott () graphidelix net> writes:

No I think your message illustrates things pretty well.  I guess the
fundimental differenc here is not only does it cost usually very little
to receive these messages it costs even less infact dramatically to send
spam.  It seems there is no real reason for the spammer to be concerned
with whether the mail is properly targeted or not so a full on flood is
possible and the leads generated by this flood percentage wise have to
be many factors less than the percentage of success in snailmail.

It does not cost "very little" to recieve spam.  At my real job (ie,
not seastrom.com), we're running a very nice (but expensive)
commercial product to filter this stuff, and in a given time quantum
during which we processed 1.9 million messages, spam and virii
accounted for about 600k (32% was the last number I saw from our stats
script).  It's reasonable to assume, since some unwanted messages slip
through, that we're over a third of all email being UCE.

<trollishly>

I'd like the costs quantified.. Servers and disks are expensive, but if
they handle a ten million messages during their lifetime, the amortized
cost PER MESSAGE is cheap.

How cheap is it?


I bullshitted about $.00022/message with
         Emails's are 10kb.
         $1/gig (bandwidth) and
         $10/gig (disk capacity, falsly assuming email is never deleted.)
         $0 (for the server, cause I can't guess within an order
             of magnitude.)

I bullshitted about $.00022/spam with
         Spams's are 10kb.
         $1/gig (bandwidth) and
         $10/gig (disk capacity, falsly assuming spam is never deleted.)
         $0 (for the server, cause I can't guess within an order
             of magnitude.)

What do you guess for the amortized cost/spam?

``A modern email infrastructure costing $XXX/day (amortized over 2 years)
can handle YYY messages, thus the average cost/message is $XXX/YYY.''

</trollishly>

I've not seen quantified numbers bandied about in the past NANOG
spam-flamewars, so maybe this isn't beating a dead horse.


I do find it amusing that nobody responded to my more relevant and
intended thrust, about how putting a 'sender pays receiver for email'
could cause a variety of new abuses of the email system.


Scott


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