Spam Back to 94% of All E-Mail

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/spam-back-to-94-of-all-e-mail/

by tokenadult • 17 years ago

32 32 17 years ago

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Femur2• 17 years ago

I'm curious as to what the overall "cost" of spam is. Other than the bandwidth cost, is spam really that big of a problem? Both my work and personal addresses rarely to ever have spam, so it really does not affect me in the slightest.

Hexstream2• 17 years ago

If the cost was really unbearable we'd have a secure mail protocol in widespread usage by now. We might be better off if the problem became so bad that we'd solve it once and for all.

dfranke3• 17 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy

Tichy• 17 years ago

It's not so simple, there might just not be a workable solution. With email, you want to allow strangers to send you mail (there must be a way to initialize first contact). So it is not trivial to lock out the spammers.

jonknee• 17 years ago

Your accounts rarely have spam thanks to the effort of many people you'll never meet (and lots of CPU cycles at your email provider).

josefresco• 17 years ago

It's the law of big numbers. Each day I spend maybe 1-2 minutes dealing with my spam. Multiply that by millions of people each day and you get massive business (and personal) time losses which equates to lost productivity/money.

bdr• 17 years ago

What law of big numbers are you referring to?

jcl• 17 years ago

Also, spam encourages or requires other illegal activities -- money laundering, fraud, violation of health standards, piracy, identity theft. And the profits are likely to be fed into other questionable businesses.

ojbyrne• 17 years ago

I still occasionally find false positives in my spambox. I would think that if you don't check for those, the cost of spam would be much higher, since the cost of each missed email >> the cost of each piece of spam not read.

bianco• 17 years ago

Following all kinds of human intercommunication, I'd say that this percentage only reflects the equivalent of really important communication on the positive side, and trash twitter (of our everyday life) on the other one.

jedc2• 17 years ago

I remember reading about Microsoft Research's "Penny Black" project, where an e-mail could be essentially certified as non-spam by various types of currencies. (Such as computational cycles, cash, etc.) What I'm curious about is how this would stand up to the networks of spam-bots... Again, it might drive traffic down for a bit as each of their infected computers takes longer for each e-mail, but I would assume they would just try harder to infect more.

(Link here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pennyblack/)

Do any spam experts have an opinion on this type of idea/project?

wmf3• 17 years ago

If sending mail requires CPU cycles, then spammers will steal cycles. If it requires real money, spammers will steal that.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/proofwork2.pdf

asciilifeform2• 17 years ago

> If it requires real money, spammers will steal that.

If you raise the cost of sending a single piece of spam sufficiently, spam will vanish. Exactly the way junk snailmail would, if the US Postal Service did not subsidize it.

jedc2• 17 years ago

I understand that cycles can be stolen easily, but somehow I think cash might be a tipping point. The reason that spam works is that they only need a 0.00(ridiculous)1% response rate to make money. The risk of getting caught stealing versus the reward of what they'd make sending spam would probably get way out of balance if cash was required to achieve that response rate.

RK• 17 years ago

Ignoring the effect of McColo, I wonder how the recession has affected spammers. Are they making more money or less?

People "down on their luck" might buy more dubious crap. Businesses in more desperate times might use less "palatable" marketing than they normally would.

mahmud• 17 years ago

They are making more. With so many people scared for their future financial stability, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that more people are more likely to fall for a "get rich quick" scam. Sex-related spam might go down with respect to male targets also, but you can bet some spam will appear targeting women with "get rich quick stripping online (doing phone sex), etc".

Spam and most blackhat businesses are just that, business. The operators are your average greedy bastards, the great majority of whom are technically incapable twenty something men who think "the internet" is still in a dotcom boom. I'm not pulling this out of thin air, all you have to do is lurk in spam boards to see the prevailing mythology; a huge majority of 20-something spammers who want to live the Hip Hop lifestyle and who will do anything for money.

They themselves get scammed left and right by everyone from competent systems programmers who sell them backdoored tools to sophisticated mafiosi who open fly-by-night "online banks" to fake advertising networks that lure them into distributing their spam links and malware and then fold just when it's time to pay up, not to mention the ponzi schemes.

The life of a spammer is a bitch. If you were dealing drugs you at least have your tangible goods in hand and cash proceeds in the other. Spamming is like drug dealing, except someone keeps your stash and drop-ships it, and another keeps your cash and gives you a metered ATM card, nickle and diming you in every step of the way.

So the question becomes, what sort of spammer is making the real money (or the most of it) instead of asking if all spammers are making moolah. And the answer would be, the guys getting paid are not exactly in the spamming business :-)

patio11• 17 years ago

I just want to say that this post comports to my experiences when I spent a year on spam boards. (My employer was working on an anti-spam product -- know your enemy and all that.)

DannoHung• 17 years ago

I don't get it man, I haven't gotten a spam email in months or at least weeks.

Don't these guys realize that it's just not getting through any more?

windsurfer• 17 years ago

Hey DannoHung, I represent the estate of a long-lost relative of yours...

Spam Back to 94% of All E-Mail

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