most of the replies here are approaching the question from the view of the sender's host point of view ignoring the server cost of the destination and the middle servers (??-- actually I don't know if the emails are still doing "hops" and using middle servers!?)
the calculation is even more difficult to be replied because different currencies and economies are being involved
yo, kose
Different parties have different prices depending on who they are and where in the system they exist, the type of email, the volume, and so on.
A super simple answer may be: Look up the price according to Mailgun or SendGrid, and a simple answer is that it costs $1 to send ~4,000 emails.
Subject: What is the cost of sending an email?
That's a really good question, BBB. The answer depends on a lot of things -- privately hosted? Using OSS only? Benefiting from the scale of a Google? How many emails are you sending on a monthly basis (since that will bring down fixed costs).
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For spammers with hacked machines: 0
Should this cost include hardware? Than it costs me at least the 1000 bucks my computer costs.
If not including the setup, than it's just the extra electricity that is used when a mail comes through as opposed to when no email comes through. I think this is the only value where it would be possible to clearly define it.
see: https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-send-an-email...
What are you sending? Who are you sending it to?
The only thing email simplifies is how it gets there