Cost of spam

What is the true cost of spam?

This text is not a technical lecture only for experts, delving deep into obscure aspects of 'spam'.
Rather the opposite; an attempt to explain it such simple terms that everyone might understand this:

What is the true cost of spam?
It cost a City a Million a Day...

The daily dose may seem petty, 1-2 minutes clicking delete in a whole day.
Irritating but insignificant, like a few flies buzzing by, who really cares.
However, the real cost is grossly underrated for several reasons:

Spam filters devour their share of the mailstream, so we only see the tip of the iceberg.
But each time you get a real email, 9 spam mails were sent but filtered out.
That number is unfortunately growing. And the growth is accelerating...

The massive amounts sent also means that spam is something everyone gets, every day, year in year out.
That's the other reason why the cost is invisible, we're not used to that many small parts
being summed to such massive heights.

On a personal scale the cost seems too petty to sum, on a global scale the enormous sums no longer makes sense.
But how do one grasp this invisible flood? I think both the personal and global view are unnecessarily extreme,
so I'll suggest an example in the middle: The City. Not a major metropolis, nor a minor village,
but a varied widespread average size city. Population of 1.000.000 working people (+ relatives).

If each person wastes a minute a day deleting spam, then 1 million minutes are lost.
If the loss of 1 minute is $1, then the city looses $1 million. Every day, every year.
What could you buy for that much? Every day? Anyone any wishes..?

PS: I should add that this calculation is a minimum estimation, as it doesn't include the cost of damages done by virus, spyware, phishing...

The dark side of spam

Some may argue that people only need to install a 100% efficient spamfilter, and then the problem is solved. However, the target is moving, evolving and mutating. No filter can get the last spam. Spamfilters also have a drawback; the more they eat, the more spam becomes invisible. Receive one email and 9 was filtered, but you never see them. If 99% was filtered out, you wouldn't see it either. Or think about it. But in the dark spam consumes a growing amount of the nets processing power. Making spam invisible only hides the symptoms, but leaves botnets, zombie-pc's and highjacked sites in the dark, evolving unseen.

Spam filters may stop spam from being received, but cannot stop it from being sent. A growing amount of bandwidth is drained in the background. Spammers enjoy free traffic since they are not paying. And the ISPs just pass the bill along. Cost of bandwidth is another case of insignificant parts being a larger sum:

How the net is drained daily

100.000.000.000 spam mail pr day (2007)
1 kb pr mail
The cost of bandwidth $0.01 pr Kb in mail

The sum is then $1 million wasted each day!
(That's $1 billion in less than 3 years...)
And the number is growing exponentially...

Links

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