[The News Bot]

Spam wastes enough energy to power more than 2.4m homes every year, a study finds.
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[Jonstone]

Of course some spam advertising will have replaced things like direct mail drops etc which would increase if you stopped spam so like all environmental arguements you have to look at the full picture before coming to any conclusions.

[jezzer256]

Eating spam has always made me fart... now we know why

[jclancy]

>Of course some spam advertising will have replaced things like direct mail drops etc which would increase if you stopped spam so like all environmental arguements you have to look at the full picture before coming to any conclusions.

Direct mail drops etc would not increase if we stopped spam - direct mail drops require registering with relevant bodies, paying to have the items printed and packed and then postage on top of that - it would also require the marketers to provide a 'do not market to me' opt out facility in countries where this is mandated.

None of this would happen because spammers are criminal gangs running criminal websites with either non-existent or counterfeit goods. The only reason spammers are able to do it is because all of their marketing costs are free; since they are all based on stealing the resources of other computer users instead of actually paying for anything themselves.

A month or two ago some computer scientists in the US managed to take over a small portion of one of the major botnets (networks of virus/trojan infected PCs used to send spam and/or run the spamvertised websites) and ran their own spam - with convincing spam websites that had broken payment links - and used it try and measure the number of spam emails that had to be sent for each sale that resulted and came up with a value of 12.5 million spam emails for each sale.

In any real marketing campaign nobody would pay for a response rate like that.

Nobody has a right to free, or even very cheap, marketing.

JClancy

[D-Zyne]

I wonder how much waste chat forums create....