This is functionally equivalent to the spammers' cry of "just hit delete". I don't pay for bandwidth on the user side of my sendmail installation; I pay for bandwidth on the user side of my ISP's internal gateway. Filters do nothing to reduce my costs, they just turn spam into a DoS attack (wasting my resources and my time) from theft of resources (using my resources to harass my users against my will). That's like turning burglary into vandalism: it's not necessarily "as bad" (though it might be worse if the RBL blacklists a busy server, or a huge bolus of spam takes down my machine), but it's still criminal.

Now, I'm willing to accept some spam as the cost of teaching people about how the net works -- it's pretty much inevitable, and generally speaking the more knowledge that's out there, the better. But let's not trivialize the cost of spam to "Just Hit Delete" or "Use Filters".

Update: Looks like I misread cjf's stance. My apologies.

--
The hell with paco, vote for Erudil!
:wq

In reply to (OT: The Cost of Spam) Re(3): How do I extract contact data from websites? by FoxtrotUniform
in thread how do I extract contact data from websites? by Meisamhe

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