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

hmm...

[arson1]

But the email said it was an exclusive deal just for me!

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?

It must work on someone.

[Xenopax]

You have to figure that is the average person is receiving 2500 spam emails a year, then the spammers must be getting enough feedback to make it worthwhile. If you think about it, you don't need a high rate, or even moderate rate, of responses from mass mailings since a small percentage could cover your spamming costs. 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.

Re:It must work on someone.

[rgmoore]

Not necessarily. Arguing that spam must work because people keep trying it is like arguing that "Make money fast" must work because people keep sending it (or variants on it). All that's required for people to keep spamming it is that they think that it works, not that it actually does work. My guess is that the only spam that actually gets a big enough response rate to justify sending it is the kind that advertizes spamming services. Unfortunately, we'll only know for sure in 10 or 20 years when everyone who's unscrupulous enough to try spamming has done so. If they all give up because it doesn't work, we'll know that it was a failure and people were just trying it because they didn't know any better. If it keeps up indefinitely, we'll know that it does work and we'll have to start revoking net access of anyone dumb enough to reply.

Re:It must work on someone.

[gus goose]

If a fool is born every minute, and there are (according to the CIA) 21.37 births per 1000 people, and (according to the US Census) there are about 6.1billion people, then there are 130Mil. births per year, or about 250 births per minute. Since one of these is a fool (and I think that is very low), then about 0.4% of the population are fools. Thus, if only fools respond to spam, then you only need to send 250 spam to get one response. Assuming that fools are less computer literate (proportionally few fools have e-mail), then you would need to send more to get a response, but not by much.

On the other hand, in the past there were fewer births per minute, and thus there were proportionally more fools. This improves the spammer's hit rate.

So, to answer your question, you get about 1 in 250 'hits' for spam.

gus

Re:Interesting survey

[flacco]

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

And they would have titled it: "Spamlet".

Re:Ofcourse the numbers are so big...

[flacco]

Finally, millions of people have a hotmail account. And there, they forget to point out that they don't want to be listed in the so-called White Pages, a main source for spammers.

Don't you mean "Microsoft Preferred Retailing Associates"?

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.

Marketing analysis

[Proaxiom]

I read something once about advertisers and marketers trying to build lists of people according to their known interests so advertising can be more cost-effective.

Based on the e-mails I get, it would seem the advertising community has me pegged as a debt-ridden pervert with a small unit, sexual dysfunction, no education, and a penchant for get rich quick schemes.

I wonder how they know that. I must be an open book.

spamcop.net

[Neon Spiral Injector]

With the last article about spam that ran on Slashdot. I saw someone mention spamcop. I knew of the service, but never really checked it out before.

After reading most everything on their site, I figured I'd sign up for their pay filter service. Not really to stop the spam (that is just a nice added benifit), but just for ease of reporting the spammers.

Since signing up spamcop has probally stopped around 50 spams to me a day. Still about 5 a day slip through (and perhaps 1 false positive a day). I have reported all of the spam. I think I've recieved about 8 responces total to my reports, and I keep getting spam from the same places.

I'm pretty impressed with the service. At $0.50 a megabyte it isn't too expencive (but I shouldn't have to pay to not recieve e-mail). They are planning on going to a flat rate of $3 a month (which will be good for me as they estimate I'll be paying about $7 a month at my current rate).

Anyway, check it out if you haven't before, www.spamcop.net. At least report some of the spam you get using their free service to help build a bigger data base of open relays and other bad Internet company.

Spam laws

[Alsee]

Spam sucks. Spam is a problem. Spam is a BadThing.

But don't push for SpamLaws. It is just an invitation for them to pass other stupid net-laws. Laws are regional, the internet is not. It won't work. The treatment will be worse than the disease.

Lawmakers do not understand the internet. Tell them to keep their hands off.

We are better off working out our own solutions - blackhole lists, filtering software, etc.

-

Re:Hey, let's build a prison just for them

[Tackhead]

> Yeah, make them read their own spam mail once for each person they sent it to. Or let's say twice. There has to be some punishment involved. ;-)

1) Jail spammer in special spammer's prison.
2) Give spammer an email address.
3) Publish spammer's address on USENET, preferably in an MLM or pr0n newsgroup.
4) Mail spammer, three times a day, an email message telling him his meal is ready, which he can print out to requisition his meal.
5) Deny spammer the use of filtering tools. If the spammer starves to death because he can't find his meal tickets among the spam, that's his problem.

I mean, why should he need a filter for his mail? Every spammer I've talked to - from trailer-trash to DMA executive - says it's easy to Just Hit Delete, right? It only takes a few seconds a day!

And I'm sure there are so many interesting offers in his mailbox, if he's not interested, he can always Just Hit Delete, right?

Ah, what I wouldn't give to be a warden in such a prison.

Re:When will people learn?

[linuxlover]

I have the same setup.

To report spam, the _easiest_ way is through spamcop.net. You signup (free) and they will send you an email address to forward your emails. So all you do is forward the email as an attachment which preserves all the headers. Spamcop will do the tedious work of hunging down the headers adn open relays abused and send a report to those automatically.

I have been using it for a week now, and absolutely love it. Give it a try. You'll be glad you did.

LinuxLover

The Missing Stat - SNR!

[nyquist_theorem]

Unsolicited mass emails are never going to go away 100%. It frustrates me that so much time and energy and print/webspace is given to studies and articles that don't include what I would think to be the most important indicator of spam's level of infiltration - Signal to Noise Ratio. Sure, the "average" user gets xxx Spam per day/year/minute, but on what amount of traffic? If the "average" user gets 1600 spam out of 1700 emails, that's obviously very bad, but 1600 on 170,000 emails a year is a lot better. The poster's comment about being on the wrong side of the bell curve doesn't neccesarily mean he's getting more spam than most people as a ratio of spam-to-legit-emails. I would be most interested in studies that analyze the SNR, for in doing so I think we'll see (even more clearly!!) that there is indeed a spam problem that must be dealt with through enforceable legislation and/or international agreements.

As a side note, I have taken to giving out different email addresses for every place I'm asked for one, and using a "catch-all" from my domain, for example my email address here is slashdot@theoretica.net, but it might be goatpornmailinglist@theoretica.net or vic20overclockerslist@theoretica.net for other places. That way not only can I see what spammers got my email address from where, but I can also block a given address once its been overcome with spam - you know those places where you are asked for an email address and you just *know* you are going to get spammed senseless for providing it, but you must to get a login or pwd or whatever?

I also have OE move everything that's been BCC'd to me into a spam folder, mark it as read, and review it once a week.

My experience as an open mail relay

[Thagg]

I reconfigured our mail server a month or so ago, and, well, misconfigured it, so that it was an open mail relay on our DSL line. It took the bad guys about 2 weeks to notice; at which point we all of a sudden started getting hit with tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of relays through our server per day.

I'm only a part-time sysadmin, so I didn't realize what was wrong for a couple of days, just noticed that the mail server was slow...during that time perhaps half-a-million messages were forwarded by my machine. Unforgivable, I know. I didn't realize the threat; and most of it happened over a weekend.

On Monday, I spent a few hours finding out what was going on, and madly tried to cancel the messages by hand from the mail queue, before I did the right thing and installed the latest version of sendmail -- which by default doesn't relay.

For the next several weeks, I've been petitioning the various spam reporting lists to take us off of their blacklists. I have to say that everybody was reasonable in this respect. It took some time to hunt them all down, but I think I have them all. If you are doing this yourself, http://relays.osirusoft.com has a great resource for checking what lists your server is blacklisted with.

The only good thing to come out of this is that during the cleanup phase, spammers continued to try to relay spam through my site, and I was able to get several of those accounts cancelled by calling up the various email abuse departments at their ISPs. (My favorite was worldcom, I called them and they answered "Abuse!" I told them that I really wanted an argument...) The biggest disappointment was @home, who required a 1-week waiting period before shutting down a really high-volume spamming operation.

I was surprised how quickly my open relay was discovered, and then how quickly that information was distributed among quite a few (at least 40) spammers. Perhaps they watch incoming spam to see where it is relayed from; and harvest those to run their own spam.

Anyway -- my apologies to the community. It won't happen again.

thad