Bill Frantz <frantz@netcom.com> writes:
At 12:45 PM -0700 6/4/97, Declan McCullagh asked:
What are the costs to consumers of unsolicited e-mail? I guess the time it takes to delete it might be one, hard drive space might be another. I would like to know how to quantify it, and compare it with the cost of sending e-mail.
I don't think the costs of the 1-3 spam messages I get each day is significant. (But I don't post to Usenet.)
I post moderately heavily to Usenet (10-10 articles / week). All the UCE I get is much less in volume that, e.g., the traffic from the Cypherpunks mailing list. In some weeks it's only 1 or 2 pieces. I may be getting so little UCE because I've asked Wallace to remove me from his mailing list, so I only get it from "rogue rogues". It takes me no material time to browse the subject lines and to skip the UCE. (Sometimes I do read the UCE - some of the products they've advertised sounded interesting to me). Nor am I paying to receive anything. (Given that I get mailbombed pretty regularly, I wouldn't go for anything other than flat rate.) --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps