Has federal anti-Spam legislation actually led to more spam, not less? The New York Times takes a look. Among the interesting findings: Spam now accounts for about 80% of all e-mail sent, up from about 20% just two years ago. An excerpt from the article:
[S]ome specialists have also suggested that the overall success of identifying and weeding out junk e-mail from in-boxes [via spam filters] may actually help explain the current surge in spam.
“The more effective the filtering technology,” Ms. Mitchell said, “the more spam they have to send to get the same dollar rate of return.”
Those rates of return can be staggeringly high (and the costs of entry into the market relatively low).
A spammer can often expect to receive anywhere from a 25 percent to a 50 percent commission on any sales of a product that result from a spam campaign, according to a calculus developed by Richi Jennings, an Internet security analyst with Ferris Research, a technology industry consulting firm.
Even if only 2,000 of 200 million recipients of a spam campaign – a single day’s response rate for some spammers – actually go to a merchant’s Web site to purchase a $50 bottle of an herbal supplement, a spammer working at a 25 percent commission will take in $25,000. If a spammer makes use of anonymous virus-enslaved computers to spread the campaign, expenses like bandwidth payments to Internet service providers are low – as is the likelihood of anyone’s tracking down who pushed the “send” button.
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