I often hear comments like “it’s no big deal”, and “just hit delete” while obsessing over tracking down and blocking spammers.
I stumbled across an interesting perspective that I wanted to share:
I think it’s worth noting that the largest cost of spam (and other forms of Internet-borne abuse) is not financial.
It’s time — irreplaceable, precious time. Do the math: construct an estimate for how many seconds it takes someone to realize that a message is spam and Just Hit Delete (TM); now multiply by all the someones doing that for the same spam message; now multiply by all the spam messages send in a day or a week or a year.
Then divide by the average human lifespan. The results are disturbing.
Luckily, MDaemon includes many tools that help you combat spam. Life’s too short to waste on deleting garbage that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
How harmful is spam? by Dave Warren (everything-mdaemon.com) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.