anybody else been spammed by "no-ip.com" yet?

Sat May 4 14:27:11 UTC 2002

On Sat, May 04, 2002 at 06:28:56AM -0400, Scott A Crosby wrote:
> [1]
> This raises an interesting question of how can you claim an email costs
> $.02 to receive, when the bandwidth to get it is about 3 orders of
> magnitude less, and diskspace costs 2 orders of magnitude less ($10/gig)?
> 
> If your average user gets 10 emails/day, that means that each user gets
> 300 emails/month, and costs you $6.00 in resources?

	You need to keep in mind the cost of disk space.  And you
can not use the el-cheapo 5400 rpm ide disks as your price model
either.  While in a smaller environment they work fine.  (read:
my home mail server), if you're running a commercial isp, you
need higher data transfer rates.

> If you have dialup users paying $20/month, do you kick them off if they
> subscribe to a busyish mailing list and get over 35 emails/day?

	If they don't fetch their e-mail in a reasonable amount of time
I have known isps to delete the mail.  My employer has given me an
earthlink account for when I travel to dial-up.  I don't
check that mail there.  I don't expect them to keep all the
spam that might accumulate so in 3 years from now when I decide
to pop-3 in for the fun of it, i download a few gigs of spam.

> In terms of ISP resources, emails cannot be costing $.02 each to receive.

	I'm not entirely supporting that figure but not disputing it.

	You need to keep in mind:

	1) Disk space costs.  You need to have a reasonable disk space
system set up for any moderate-large sized isp.  This includes 
10krpm scsi disks as well as raid including backups.  (Your customer
John doesn't want to lose his e-mail from Aunt Sally).
	2) not everyone reads their mailbox realtime or locally.
While the average ISP customer is online more and more time a
month and cable modems and other services have increased their ability
to fetch their e-mail in more frequency, you may have to store
mail for up to 2 weeks for the average user.  (anything over that
they're out of the country I suspect and not interested in their
e-mail).
	3) the cost of the bits over transit/peering are low enough
that most people don't count them, they are very low as compared
to the cost of disk space/cpu and ram required to handle massive amounts
of e-mail in a reasonable/prompt manner, but they do exist.  One will
need to invest in a seperate ethernet switch and other devices to help
keep the traffic segmented.  this is a component of the cost of
an isp providing smtp service.

> In terms of the time to delete them, I could believe that they cost $.02
> each. (If you value your time at $20/hour, $.02 is 3 seconds)

	an ISP with about 250k customers needs many gigs of disk space
to hold their mail and about 10-15 servers to process it.  As the
spam increases, the number of servers required will go up because
you have to process those smtp connections.  There are also the
technology costs of building a smtp system that can handle such
a large environment.

	I (continue to) see mail as the #1 reason people connect
to the internet.  It's fast and reliable.  If your provider
has only one link out and it's down, you can still get/deliver
your mail (assuming they don't have a poorly designed network)
and it will reach its destination.  This is also why people complain
more about the ads they receive as compared to the ones that they
view on websites.  They understand the difference between making
the outbound request for info and expecting to get some noise
as compared to saying "give me the messages directed at me".  They
don't want the noise in their personal messages but in
the public space they are less sensitive.

	- Jared

-- 
Jared Mauch  | pgp key available via finger from jared at puck.nether.net
clue++;      | http://puck.nether.net/~jared/  My statements are only mine.