Another observation on current business...

[Hell Puppy]

Originally Posted by rhetorical

After following the can spam shelleehale fiasco, it occurs to me that I used to post on this very forum about rampant spammers and how they cost us all money. This forum was driven by nick@ilynx and his partner who was one of the biggest "mailers" ever. I used to post how it was costing all of us very large, and was shit on for being a whiner. But I knew that these guys were thieves and lacked real talent. A lot of "old school" guys made a lot of money out of what we are discussing today. And they still talk fondly of those good old days, which I think were actually immoral and criminal, whether you escaped by the skin of your teeth or not. I always maintained that this had nothing to do with acumen...it was more akin to selling crack (any moron can do it), but I have to say that I was dumped on from a very high altitude for saying what is being posted on this board today. Y'all know who posted what (except for Rcourt who has no clue), but it is nice to know that what was so obvious, actually happened. Fortunately, as we know now, guys like the previous owners of this board are not doing so well ...and that is an understatement. There is something to be learned from genuine "old school" which is not just ten fucking years (yeah pat yourselves on the back)....but true wisdom...like the tortoise and the hare.

I've gotta wonder what the true overall cost of spam to the internet is in terms of bandwidth and server power?

Up until the last year or so I hosted my own email for alot of my domains. These domains all had published addresses for auto responders, mail forms, things likes that. It finally got to the point that I was tired of spending the few hours a month it took to stay on top of updating anti-spam tools, tweaking rules and filters just to be able to actually READ the real pieces of mail inbetween the spam.

Where I really snapped was when I realized I was going to have to add additional servers just to host my email, and this is on some high end well tuned boxes. My databases were slowing down because I had multiple domains that were receiving over a million pieces of email every 24 hours. I'm not exaggerating....over a MILLION.... You could tail the maillog and it would spin like a slot machine 24/7.

I outsourced all of my email handling. It saves just little old me over $1000 a month in server and bandwidth. I never realized it was that much or I would've done it much sooner. And that doesn't include the man hours wasted updating the spam tools or trying to wade thru the spam that made it thru anyway.

Now can you imagine how much extra capacity something like gmail or hotmail has to have just to receive reject or delete all this garbage.

Email is one of the most useful tools on the net and it has been rendered all but useless by many of these jackasses.