Spam is King
Spam is a booming business and according to a recent poll almost 30% of you are the problem. The Internet security firm Marshal recently released a study that says that 29.1% of Internet users make purchases as a result of email spam.
Compounding the problem is that most spam customers have made two or more purchases, suggesting that some people are forming buying habits. The most common items purchased were sexual enhancement pills, software, adult material and luxury items such as watches, jewelery and clothing; most of which is either pirated material or brand name knock-offs.
Despite CanSpam laws and improved email filters, spam is still a popular way for shady front men to sell their wares and for people like the notorious spam King Eddie Davidson to cash in.
It may seem unbelievable that spam could be so successful, but consider that even in these hard economic times spam is a booming industry. Marshal says that global spam volumes have doubled in the last year, with approximately 150 billion spam messages sent out every day making up 85% of all email messages. More surprising is the fact that only 10 purchases are made for every million emails, and when you consider that most of these messages are blocked by filters, the success rate for spam that makes it to the inbox is probably much higher.
Spam has always been a relatively cheap way to deliver large amounts of advertising material to the masses, and the advent of botnets has made it far more cost effective. Botnets give spammers the ability to hijack a large number of computers and leave them to do the dirty work. As a result, distribution prices have plummeted. Current data from the FBI suggests that the cost for sending one million messages is about $5-10 USD.
The Marshal study shows a significant increase in spam buying activities when compared to a Forrester poll from 2004 that said only 20% bought from spam emails. But this new study should be taken with a grain of salt, because the sampling comes from a pool of only 622 respondents, compared with 6,000 from the Forester study.
Whether spam respondents comprise 20%, 30%, or more of the online community, as long as people want to get their hands on Viagra and imitation Gucci, it seems "unwanted" emails will keep on coming.
PC World's Marketplace
PC World's Free Whitepapers
tech news tech blogs community & forums laptop prices software reviews downloads
What I find amazing is that companies are still having trouble with Spam. We had a lot of problems a few years back and struggled just as much with the solution software as we did with the spam itself. The mail server anti-spam tasks interfered with our mail server and needed constant updating.
Today, our anti-spam is outsourced to a service which runs it against about 20 major filters. Anything considered to be spam gets redirected to spam@mycompany.com, all other mail makes it through.
On the rare occasions when we do actually get a spam message, all we have to do is forward it to the service company and let them deal with it. No more anti-spam issues for us to worry about - and since the service is used by lots of other companies, whenever they request updates to the rules, we all benefit.