Gabe said that just the additional email they received over a few days cost them a million: "That's like 1% of the cost of the incremental email the program has generated for Valve employees (yes, I mean pissing off the Internet costs you a million bucks in just a couple of days)."

That seemed preposterous to me. It can't be the additional hardware expenses to store/process the mail, those are negligable. I suppose it's simply the time the support staff have to spend to weed out all the irate mails. But can that really amount to a million dollars? Existing solutions for combating spam must be sufficient to classify those mails and throw them away or send out the boilerplate message the support staff would have sent otherwise.