Why SPAM is such an issue

By admin / October 7, 2008

One might ask a question: “If I send a lot of spam, what is the big deal? Users who don’t want it, will just delete it, right”? The problem with that, is that it is not that simple. First of all, in order to properly transfer this email message, a lot of infrastructure must be set in place. Wires, switches, Internet bandwidth, SMTP server, managers, IT personnel, monitoring facilities and so on. The more email messages that has to be delivered through the servers, the bigger the volume of it all. New high capacity servers, more Internet bandwidth, more infrastructure and so on.

One might ask a question: “If I send a lot of spam, what is the big deal? Users who don’t want it, will just delete it, right”? The problem with that, is that it is not that simple. First of all, in order to properly transfer this email message, a lot of infrastructure must be set in place. Wires, switches, Internet bandwidth, SMTP server, managers, IT personnel, monitoring facilities and so on. The more email messages that has to be delivered through the servers, the bigger the volume of it all. New high capacity servers, more Internet bandwidth, more infrastructure and so on. Older systems could not cope with increasing volumes of spam, since literally millions and millions of junk messages are traveling ISP’s world wide. Even if it will get thrown out and filtered to the mailbox, some computer must accept the connection, do some verification and make the decision based on it’s own algorithms whether to accept a message or reject it. This too will require a more powerful hardware as the rate of the messages increases.
This begs the question! Who will pay for this huge infrastructure? As the rate of messages increase, a lot of financial injections are required. It appears, that the cost is divided between each individual user of a given ISP. This cost is added into the monthly statement for your Internet and that is where the problem lies. I am pretty sure, nobody wants to pay for somebody’s junk messages, but yet we are forced to do this every day.
This by itself is already a problem, but that is not all. We loose a lot of productivity going through the junk messages every day. If we do not use any anti spamming agents to filter out the spam for us, our mailboxes become so clogged with junk, that we can only expect to see 1 good message out of a 100, but yet we have to go through them and delete them every day loosing an hour every day easily.
That is why all ISP’s and software developers (including us) have adopted a no spamming policy and are actively fighting spam every way they can.

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