Why spammers cost you money
- Do your friends send you jokes, images, even video clips by email that they are just sure will make you laugh, perhaps make you cry but that you will definitely find extremely interesting? Do business and clubs send you their regular electronic newsletters and promotions which are full of pictures drawings and graphics?
Do people you have never heard of send you colourful promotions for products you don't need or want? Perhaps you chuckle or cry or swear but in any event your email In Box is soon full to overflowing. Only you can get rid of the junk mail and it is going to cost you money to get rid of it.
We are all accustomed to the fact that our regular surface mail letter boxes get filled with junk mail. Annoying, but we don't pay the postage, only the sender pays. Junk mail on the internet costs both the sender AND the receiver money. Read on to learn why you pay for the junk mail you receive and how you can cut the costs.
The amount of information that we transfer in either direction between the internet and our computer is called bandwidth. Bandwidth is measured in bytes and because a byte is a very small amount of bandwidth the amount is normally referred to in thousands, millions or billions of bytes. You know, like the Zimbabwean dollar.
One thousand bytes is a kilo byte and is displayed as 1KB. A million bytes is a mega byte displayed as 1MB and a billion bytes is a giga byte displayed as 1GB. These figures do not refer to the speed of data transfer only the amount of data transferred.
Most people are connected to the internet with a plan which places a limit on the amount of bandwidth they can use in a month before incurring penalties. Some of the penalties are quite expensive. Anyone who has run over their allocation with BigPond will know that there can be very expensive penalties.
Internet connection plans vary widely in allocated bandwidth and cost depending on the ISP. Typical plans for home connections vary between 1GB or one billion bytes per month up to 12GB. Prices can be from as low as $25.00 per month for a 1GB plan up to BigPond's very expensive $80.00 per month for a 12GB plan.
Most home users will find that a 3GB plan is adequate while others will use two or three times this amount. Far too many people however are forced to use more expensive plans and even incur penalties because of junk mail sent to them by other people including well meaning family and friends.
The most important thing to remember is that whichever plan you use the amount of bandwidth that you purchase means the data transferred in BOTH directions. That is you pay for all the data you receive and all the data you send. So if you send a photo of the kids to a friend you pay to send it and the friend pays to receive the photo.
A typical short email of two to five paragraphs uses about 5KB of bandwidth. This bandwidth is paid for by both the person who sends the email and the person who send the mail. So you could send and receive 200,000 of short email's with a 1GB internet connection plan.
But if we now include a picture of the grand kids this suddenly changes. The colour picture or image may take anywhere from 50KB to 150KB of bandwidth. Some photo's that are copied straight from a camera to an email may take up to 5MB or five million bytes. Therefore only about 200 email's can be sent and received using a 1GB plan.
So if you take a photo of the kids, transfer if from the camera directly to an email and send it to ten friends and family up to 50MB might have been been used to send the mail. So 5% of the monthly allocation has gone on one email. Another 19 photo's and the allocation is all used up. Videos can be even heavier and therefore even more expensive to send and receive.
While we can certainly control how much bandwidth we use in sending email it is more difficult to monitor the amount of bandwidth we use to download incoming email. Some people are frequently forced to use up to 3GB or more every month just to clear their email in boxes. This is expensive, time consuming and bloody annoying.
What we need is a way to preview the mail BEFORE we download and perhaps never download email from some places that continually send junk email. This junk email, called spam is often a heavy user of bandwidth. Eliminating spam without seeing it, reading it or most importantly, downloading it is what we must and can do.
A very smart program developed in New Zealand solves 99% of the problems and expense involved with identifying, controlling and deleting spam at minuscule cost to bandwidth. The program named Mail Washer actually allows you to preview email before downloading from the ISP server where your incoming mail is stored.
What you see in the Mail Washer screen on your computer is just who the mail is from, the subject, the size of the email and the first few lines of text. No images are displayed. You can then either agree to download the complete email or delete it without downloading. You can also ban further email from the same address plus a host of other options which can save a lot of money.
So in effect this smart technology allows you to take a cheap peek at the email before you download it. This saves you time and money. The Mail Washer program can save you a lot more money than the cost price not to mention the handfulls of hair that perhaps you can no longer afford to tear out.
-
