Subject: Re: [Asrg] SMTP over SSL

From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2003 18:32:01 -0700 (MST)

> From: "Eric S. Imsand" <[email-masked]>

> I agree that what you're saying is certainly possible... if someone 
> making $500,000 /yr. goes on a crusade for half the day, then the 
> figures could be artificially inflated.

$200,000/year for salary, benefits and overhead rents at most
one mid-grade engineer.  That's about $1.60/minute.  It's easy to
spend a minute or two looking at one message and griping about it,
or poking around WHOIS records or other stuff.

> That having been said, I respectfully disagree.  I have purposefully not 
> installed spam filters on the server I run, so that I can collect raw 
> data for some research that I will (someday) do.  I currently receive, 
> on average, about 50 pieces of spam mail a day, and it takes me about 
> 1-2 minutes to clean it out.  If you assume that everyone in the company 
> I work for takes a similar amount of time (a reasonable assumption, I 
> believe), then I do not believe that the cost comes from people spending 
> time cleaning out there inboxes.

1-2 minutes for 50 spam is 1-2 seconds/spam.  I don't see how you can
do more than glance at subject lines.

> I don't have the spam statistics sitting by my side, but if we assume 
> that each spam message takes 500 bytes - 1Kbyte, and each employee 
> receives 50 spams a day, that is between 25-50Kbytes of space eaten up 
> by spam, per day.  The company I work for employs 20 people, so that's 
> roughly 500 Kbytes - 1Mbyte per day devoted to spam storage.  Now, make 
> a couple of reasonable assumptions: first, assume that not everyone is 
> conscious about emptying their trash (I have seem employees let their 
> trash folders grow to be 50 Mbytes).  Second, assume that, instead of 20 
> people, this company employs 200 people.  Clearly, the numbers can get 
> quite big in a hurry.
> ...

I thought we were talking about the cost per message, not the cost
per company.  No matter how small the cost per spam, if you pick a big
enough company you can get a big total cost for all spam for the company. 

Given your 1 KByte/message value, a $200 disk will hold about 50,000,000
spam forever.  I think 1 KBute is 5X too small, and you might want to
put mailboxes on disk systems that cost 100X the $200 of a 50 GByte
at the nearest retailer.  Still, that that's $20,000 to hold 10,000,000
spam forever or $0.002 or one fifth of a penny per spam.

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]
_______________________________________________
Asrg mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/asrg