Subject: spam milestone reached

From: Oleg Goldshmidt <[email-masked]>
Date: 13 Aug 2003 21:57:12 +0300

"Nadav Har'El" <[email-masked]> writes in linux-il:

> I get about 200 emails a day, around 50 of which are spam. 

Consider yourself lucky. I am not sure about the etiquette rules for
citing a posting to one list in a new thread on another, but this
would be OT for linux-il, there is a significant intersection in
audience, and your cited message was very timely, because I just read
an article on spam in the newest issue of Spectrum. I am not sure if

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/spectrum/aug03/features/spam.html

is available to everybody or only to IEEE members, but there is no
harm in trying the URL.

Besides the welcome emphasis on open source anti-spam filters (mostly
Bayesian, Graham's "Plan for Spam" occupying a very prominent position
in the text), there are some interesting tidbits that I thought were
worth mentioning.

It appears that the world has reached a new milestone of dubious moral
and economic value: this past May the amount of spam exceeded
legitimate emails for the first time in history, according to a UK
email security firm MessageLabs Ltd. 

Fortunately, up to 80% of spam never reaches end users, being filtered
by ISPs. AOL, for instance, discards 2.4 BILLION spam messages A DAY,
equivalent to 70 emails a day in each subscriber's mailbox (numbers
for MSN are similar). Damn! If that's 80% then 600 million spam
messages a day do reach AOL subscribers, which is of the order of 18 a
day per mailbox. I am as aware of the problem as the next guy, but the
numbers are bloody impressive. 

What is not clear from the article (the numbers are given by an AOL
executive) is whether the spam goes *to* AOL subscribers or *from* AOL
subscribers. In the latter case just 100 spammers sending out 30
million messages a day on average will account for the traffic. That's
not the record: e.g. a guy nicknamed "Buffalo Spammer" sent 825 million
messages to a single ISP, Earthlink. He used 343 accounts, and used up
$1MM worth of bandwidth. He was arrested and tried, albeit not on spam
charges (spam is legal), but for bank fraud (stolen credit cards) and
identity theft (using the cards to open bogus accounts). [Google for
"Buffalo Spammer" if curious.]

The article also gives a well-known explanation for the
phenomenon. Your expenses as a spammer are a PC, an Internet account
(or several), and e-mail lists, which are less than $100 for several
million addresses. Figure a $2000 investment all in all. If you are
selling a product for $59.95, you need 34 purchases for, say, 20
million mailings to break even. You can safely bet that more than
0.00017% of the world's population are suckers, even if you count only
connected induhviduhals. Direct mail print campaigns need 1.5-2.0%
response rate to break even - 4 orders of magnitude difference.

I am immune to LovScan and other afflictions related to open
windows. But spam gets to my Linux box, too. Deep sigh...

-- 
Oleg Goldshmidt | [email-masked]