Crazy Stats on Spam

gtaylor writes "An article in the Korea Times says that market research firm Emforce has established that South Korean internet users average about 1600 pieces of spam annually, summing to around 39 billion pieces of spam per year. According to the same story, Americans receive about 2500 pieces of spam per year." I figured that I get somewhere around 30-40,000 pieces of spam annually. Lucky me... I get *this* statistic to be on the other side of the bell curve :)

Comments

Interesting survey

[.sig]

What I think would be an interesting addition to this would be to look at how much spam finds it's way onto newsgroups and weblogs such as this. My guess would be several orders of magnitude more, quite a waste of time and energy.

If they were typing randomly odds are one of them should have produced the next Hamlet by now.

Re:Interesting survey

[doc_traig]

Exactly. The scary thought here is how much waste goes into all the pieces that never reach an inbox somewhere. I wonder what the hit:miss ratio is, generally.

- DDT

Re:Interesting survey

[waitdyahoo.com]

Here is another stat that would be intersting to find out what percentage of all internet trafic is devoted to Spam.

Would the net speed up 5% if all spam was made illigal?

My SPAM i am

[crumbz]

I get between 20-30 messages daily, sometimes spiking up to 40+. I have had the same email address for 9 1/2 years but the problem only really began about 2 years ago. Then the network effect [URL?] must have taken effect and it skyrocketed. I subscibe to the usual privacy measures and don't give it out in newsgroups, return emails etc. but it is out there and they won't leave me alone. Waa!

How do you tell what is and isn't spam?

[Quasar1999]

What is spam? Unsolicited emails for unknown people? Unsolicited emails from companies you once did business with? Unsolicited email from companies you still do business with? Unsolicited email from relatives? How do you measure spam if you can't even define it?

How is SPAM distributed?

[sam_handelman]

The posters mention of being on the "far side of the bell curve" raises an interesting question - how is Spam distributed? Obviously, it's not a bell curve; a significant number of people are getting as much Spam at the submitter, and a significant number of people are getting none. If 5% of "users" (do they mean user/person or user/address?) are getting as much Spam as the submitter, and everyone else is getting next to none, than Spam is not nearly as much of a problem as this article indicates.

For example, as a person, I get a lot of spam. But almost all of it is going to my old account at the university of california (when I left I started giving the address to anybody who wanted one, for any reason.) However, the addresses I actually use get none.

Re:How is SPAM distributed?

[ergo98]

how is Spam distributed?

Of course there isn't one central "spammers registry" out there that all spammers draw from, but rather there are hundreds or thousands of disparate database compiled by culling newsgroups, scraping HTML, and of course by siphoning from other databases (forming an inheritance of email class instances): As such depending upon the spammers database source the likelihood of you getting fragged by them varies.

I've used my real, unadulterated (like terrorism: Put crap in your email address to lamely obfuscate it and you've let the spammers win) email address in newsgroup posts, and because of that I get about 40 spams a day to my hotmail account. Hotmail does a good job of filtering, but on top of that because I only use that account for online registrations to trivial sites, and fluff stuff I can scan through it with little concern that something important will be lost in the mass of spam.

Razor

[Reelworld]

I've got so fed up of spam over the festive season that I finally got off my butt and installed Razor as featured on /. the other day. I've always been kind of against the complete black-hole idea, so Razor was very attractive.
So far I'm quite impressed. Easy to install (a couple of lines in procmailrc) and it's picked up about 50% of the spam I've received so far - importantly it hasn't flagged any legitimate messages as spam. Of course, I reported the other 50%, so that hopefully others won't have to endure them. The nice thing about the systems is that the more people that use it, the more effective it gets. It's not perfect, but in this mean 'ole spam-filled world, it's a good place to start.

Re:Razor

[Tony Hoyle]

I did something similar... I installed spamassassin and because I didn't entirely trust it, configured it to redirect everything marked 'spam' to a separate email address.

It was so successful at home (100% hitrate!) I installed it on the gateway at work. It only mis-diagnoses about one message a week (for some reason it doesn't like sports related e-magazines) but I can whitelist the domains where required. I've only had one spam in my inbox since (mutated nigerian scam) & people keep saying 'what spam problem... I haven't had a spam for weeks!'.

The spam trap has approx. 2000 emails in it so far.. I keep them all out of morbid fascination. Perhaps one day I'll find a spammer I really hate and sent the lot to them!

Fight SPAM with Postfix

[toupsie]

I used to run only sendmail for my SMTP needs but I found it a pain to administer when it came to SPAM. In the last year, I have moved all the e-mail servers I manage over to Postfix. Since I have done the switch, I am killing SPAM very effectively -- some still slip through but not many.

By checking my logs for the last 24 hours, I have killed over 800 SPAMs for my 100+ users. If this is a 'typical day' in the life of my e-mail server (though I am seeing more around Christmas than ever), I am killing ~3,000 SPAMs per year per user. Not only does blocking SPAM give me a deep sense of personal satisfaction it gives me more time during my work day to do more important duties (like reading Slashdot) because I don't have users calling me to complain about the sex ads, mortgage offers and fly by night investment opportunities in their e-mail box.

I would love to see the US Congress require all e-mail marketeers to be opt-in instead of opt-out (with the Death Penalty for violators). However, I don't know if this would be effective as most of the SPAM coming in is from foreign servers (mainly Asian nations).

Re:30-40k messages of SPAM? Stay away from the por

[ackthpt]

Have your email address on a webpage seems a surefire way to get spammed. Many of mine are related to re-registering my domain, reduce costs of web hosting, accept credit cards, etc.

He's supposed to be watching Lord of the Rings, or so he said at the end of an earlier article. I've been waiting for Taco's review, which will probably go something like this:

I laughed

I cried

I drove back home to get my wallet

The Lack of an Anti-Spam Lobby

[DaveWood]

It somtimes amazes me that politicians would pass up such an excellent opportunity to please the electorate at so little political cost to themselves - why not just ban spam? All of the ingredients are there:

1) Issue affects better educated citizens who are more likely to vote
2) No one likes spam. No one at all. Except for the spammers, that is
3) It's a magnet for all kinds of illegal activity
4) Unsolicited faxes are already prohibited - the technical and legal parallels are clear as day

And yet every time spam bills appear, they disappear, or are neutered, with lightning speed. Then I remember. This is America.

With the exception of what I have heard politicians refer to as "hot button" issues (abortion, gun control, school prayer), the sad reality is that almost nothing gets through congress unless someone is paying for it.

Congressionals and members of the executive are so deluged with paying customers that they seldom have time to worry about the real world. The rest of the time, rivals routinely block each others' attempts to pass any legislation as a matter of principle or habit or a continuous cycle of revenge, usually across party lines.

Re:The Lack of an Anti-Spam Lobby

[legLess]

Actually, the Direct Marketing Association loves spam. They see that dead-tree mail is going the way of the dodo, and more communication every day is electronic. They see spam as a wonderful way to increase their reach and simultaneously lower their costs.

They're thinking long-term: in 25 years, they want to be able to legally send anything to anyone, ideally with little or no cost to themselves. Science fiction is replete with examples of this thinking: intelligent door agents or house-bots who spend (too) much of their time filtering what we've come to think of as spam (i.e. unsolicited electronic communication).

The DMA sees the Internet as a "push" medium, with themselves as the prime pusher. "We'll tell you what you need, and want," they say.

In summary, this is sadly not as much a no-brainer for Congress as you'd think or hope. The DMA has been throwing huge money at this problem for years, and will continue to do so. Don't trust Congress to do the Right Thing.

Re:What this says...

[morcego]

* The U.S. is where the money is or * The U.S. is where the stupid people are

Well, this is kind of interesting.
You see, I have, basically, 4 e-mail domains I use.
- 1 .org address
- 1 .org domain
- 3 .br addresses at a major ISP domain
- 1 .br address at my work

Even though something like 80% of the e-mails I receive is at my work address, I still have the following percentage of spam:

- 1 .org address -> 3%
- 1 .org domain -> 50%
- 3 .br addresses at a major ISP domain -> 90%
- 1 .br address at my work -> 3%

So, as you can see from my Completly Unacurate Statistcs Study(tm), it seens to me that your domain is more relevant to the amount of spam you receive then the country of it
Just to give an additional data, my .org domain is the most widely known of them. My address e-mail is the second best. My addresses from the ISP are the least known, and are the ones that received (percentage) the most spam.
Something like 15 spams reach my e-mail boxes every day, which amounts for something like 5475 spams/year. Considering that my evasive measures and filters get something like 80% of all the spam directed to me, we can consider that I have around 30000 spams/year target at me. And I live in Brazil. So not, it's not something only Americans are subject to.

sold on sales

[Erris]

What we need to do is find the small percentage that is responding to this mail and whack them over the head, otherwise it will never end.

Whack my grandmother at your peril, it's never going to end.

The ultimate fools are those who buy your logic and pour money into advertising. This works just as well for the suckers who buy "harvester" software as it does for folks who buy billboards. All it buys the purchaser is customer anoyance. The more advertised something is, the less likely I am to buy it. Unfortunatly there's a sucker born every minute who thinks "brand recongition" can be earned in some way other than solid performance, positive reviews and customer satisfaction.

Never trust someone who connives.

I wonder what costs the economy more warez or spam

[smartin]

Maybe the current govt crack down is targeted at the wrong set of Internet wrong doers.

Re:Spam laws

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and as soon as we devise an effective blocklist, the bigger spammers turn around and get a court injunction to block the useage of this tool, while they sue the people who maintain the tool.

I'm sorry, but at least here in the US of A, where lawyers swarm like roaches, we need laws to outlaw this activity, in order to preempt these types of delaying actions in our legal system.

The worst thing that could happen is for one of these spammer vs. good guy lawsuits, where the spammer wins (probably, because the good guy/gal has fewer funds to fight with.) This sets preceedent, and would embolden all of the wanna-be spammers to generate even more spam.

By outlawing the practice first, we limit any lawsuits just to the law outlawing spam, and in doing so, pit the deep pockets of the spammers against the even deeper pockets of the US govt.

Again, this is my take on the situation just here in the US.