Secondary effects also are felt by Origination Operators. Further, many senders of bulk UCE use tactics which are often viewed as devious, and probably illegal, in order to reduce the cost to the sender or even to hide the true identity of the sender. Instead, costs are shifted from the actual sender to the receiver and their Destination operator. That is, these tactics can be used by senders of any kind of bulk email, not just commercial email. Probably the most important negative effect of UCE is the financial cost incurred transmitting it from the, Destination Operator's host to the recipient user's host, such as through a modem.
Many users have to pay their Internet access providers by the minute.
Even users with fixed-cost Internet accounts often have to pay for the phone time to connect to their Internet access providers. Multiply these costs by the hundreds of thousands or millions of users that many pieces of UCE go to, and you can see that the cost to recipients is quite high, even without taking into account the considerable costs to Destination Operators and the Internet backbone. There are other costs paid by all UCE recipients that are similar to recipients of bulk postal mail. For instance, there is the time lost sorting UCE from wanted mail, the time lost opening unwanted UCE that is disguised as email that the user might want to read, and so on. As the quantity of UCE increases, the cost of doing this sorting can become quite significant.