The New York Times runs a piece on the various estimates of how much spam costs the nation--as if anyone could possibly know that, consider all the complications and tradeoffs, and sum them up in a figure like $10 or $20 billion. The article includes a contrary point of view: “Peter S. Fader, a marketing professor at the Wharton School who has studied e-mail, says the research firms’ estimates vastly overstate the actual cost of spam. ‘I am deeply skeptical that these crude top-down methods are accurate,’ he said. ‘Hitting the delete key is far more efficient than carrying your physical mail from the mailbox over to the trash can.’ He also argues that the computers and networks that are being installed to deal with spam will be a powerful resource for processing legitimate e-mail, once spam filters and economic Darwinism tame the spam epidemic. ‘Spam, although it is a bad thing per se, is fostering the growth of the e-mail infrastructure,’ he said.”
