If you know me, you know my stance on spam, and you’ll know that it pleases me to hear that the king of spam has been sentenced to 47 months in jail. According to this article, he got a lighter sentence because as far as spammers go, he was less malicious than other big spammers — he didn’t damage anyone’s computer, direct users to pornographic sites, or send out malicious code, as other spammers have done.
What I would like spammers to understand is the financial burden they place on others when they do what they do. Bandwidth costs money. Mail servers cost money to maintain. End-users don’t WANT the messages, so they complain to their ISPs, who have to pay support technicians to field those calls. I have seen spam incidents incur thousands of dollars in costs, from overloading mail servers to lost revenue, and I was working for a relatively small ISP operation at the time. Imagine how much spam costs the AOLs and Yahoos of the world.
