Erik_
Yeah, it's definitely an Exchange server
Wed Aug 30, 2023 9:54am

It's just been so long since I've done IT/SRE work besides just development that I wasn't sure if maybe MIcrosoft had their own spam filter that they do on top of whatever your local Exchange server has set up. I guess thinking about it now, that would probably annoy a bunch of IT workers who are wondering where/why emails are getting marked as spam (even more so if they're not actually spam) before even reaching their Exchange server.
Here's a 10 year old article from Harvard Business that put it at around 95 cents/email : https://hbr.org/2013/04/email-is-not-free

This accounted for the time wasted with people reading the spam emails too though:

"Anecdotally this clearly affected our company’s efficiency, but we had all the data points to calculate the bottom-line financial impact. By
calculating average typing speed, reading speed, response rate, volume of email, average salary, and total employees, *we were looking at a
seven-figure price tag to quantify our email pollution*. A “free and frictionless” method of communication had soft costs equivalent to procuring a small company Learjet. Each individual email ate up 95 cents of labor costs."


AWS charges 10cents/email sent or received but that's to the person buying their service so the actual cost for Amazon is much much less:
https://aws.amazon.com/ses/pricing/


Not sure how much you can actually trust Quora but this seems more on track of what we were thinking:
https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-send-an-email

"400 words is about 2.4 KB. Email headers add on about 2.6 KB. So that's about 5 KB of text. Amazon SES will let you send 350 TB of email per month at $0.05/GB. 350 TB is 358400 GB. At $0.05 GB, that's a total of $17,920. 350 TB is 375809638400 KB. 375809638400 KB / 5 KB/email = 75161927680 emails. $17,920/75161927680 emails is about $0.00000023841 per e-mail, or 0.000023841 cents per e-mail. So ... about two hundred thousandths of a cent."

  • Good question... Probably what you're thinking. - Puckdropper, Fri Aug 25 2023 6:05am
    I'm sure somewhere you can find stats on how much stuff is on the Internet backbones that no one actually wants. Spam, the Nieman-Marcus cookie recipie that's been forwarded 35 times without being cleaned up, etc. It's actually quite a bit. It could be that it's an exchange server... Yahoo! and... more
    • Yeah, it's definitely an Exchange server- Erik_, Wed Aug 30 2023 9:54am
      • So now we know--email sending is cheap (like stealing) - Puckdropper, Wed Aug 30 2023 5:09pm
        and the receivers waste around $.95/message (like those being stolen from) and the only real solution is filtering (like theft prevention) but that takes resources (like buying locks does) and everyone except the spammers (thieves) would be happier without it. I really didn't expect the analogy to... more
"Forces act when not restrained" - Puckdropper