Spam - Cheap to Send, Expensive to Receive

Spam costs virtually nothing to send. In fact since the resources are often stolen, it can literally be free for the party sending the unwanted email. In the worst case scenario they may be out the setup costs of a soon-to-be-terminated ISP account.

On the assumption raw bandwidth costs $1 / gigabyte, and an average spam messages is 1k, an typical email might cost $0.0001 to send. That's $1.00 per 1,000,000 messages sent. Anti-spam email technologies inevitably prevent some mail from getting delivered. However, even if only 1 in 100 people goes on to visit the corresponding website, that's 10,000 visitors per dollar. Each visitor would cost about 1/100th of a cent.

With these kind of numbers, almost all users would have to employ highly effective spam prevention measures to have any hope of making spam unprofitable.

In comparison, pay-per-click advertising typically starts at about $.05 per user. That's 500 times more expensive than sending spam email. It's hard to make direct comparisons like this. In the end, it's pretty clear that spamming is a very cheap way to advertise.

On the flip side, spam is expensive to receive. A new report indicates that spam costs U.K. users about $40 annually in lost time. This is of course an average figure. Users with particularly tough spam problems could be out hundreds of dollars per year. These individuals would clearly benefit from spam email filters.

Compounded these numbers really add up. The total cost for all U.K. users is in excess of $2 billion.

SpamButcher offers an inexpensive answer to end user's spam problems. A free trial of the email spam blocker can be downloaded from this website.

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