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Spam Increases Make Things Tough For Companies

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the to-say-nothing-of-little-old-me dept.

dosten sent us a link to a story running on Cnet about the spam epidemic. My favorite stat is that by 2006, we'll be getting 1400 spam a year. Of course, I already get that every week. Talks about foreign spam relays, block lists, and so on. Decent piece explaining a huge problem that's only getting worse.

3 of 360 comments (clear)

  1. Growth, Growth, Growth.... by mlknowle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The 1400 number is a bit sketchy; I think to assume that SPAM will continue to grow at a current rate for four years is more than a bit unreasonable.

    On the contrary, I think one of two things will happen:

    1. SPAM will explode long before 2006 - the number of messages will grow to such an extent that a political solution will become unavoidable. In effect, the SPAMers will SPAM themselves out of existence - but not without paralyzing the net for some time.

    2. SPAM click rates will continue to fall, and bandwidth costs will soar, so eventually the point will be reached that most SPAM will no longer be viable economically- this may be some time away, but I think it is certainly a possibility.

    Even if costs increase, something tells me that 1) is far more likely to occur than 2)..... But the most likely thing to happen will be that I move to a address-book-only-accepted mailbox setup... Sigh.....

  2. 1,400 per YEAR by NickPest · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Internet researcher Jupiter Media Metrix estimates that consumers will receive about 206 billion junk e-mailings in 2006--an average of 1,400 per person, compared with about 700 per person this year.

    Still, that's only about 4/day which seems very conservative to me.

  3. Re:Overblown article by telbij · · Score: 5, Insightful
    First of all, I think you are right that simply deleting spam is not all that difficult or expensive. But in practice there are many more costly effects spam can have that can drive up the average cost ($1 is still pretty high though):

    • Employees may actually waste time clicking on spam links
    • High-bandwidth graphical spam can bring slow computers and connections to their knees
    • Spam can obfuscate legitimate emails, causing them to be deleted by accident in a flurry of spam deletions
    • I've experienced crashes that may have been caused by the huge volume of email, or the piss-poor HTML code, but definitely had to do with spam. Data loss is unquantifiable.
    All in all, I think having an administrator try to filter out spam before it gets to the 45,000 employees is a good idea. I mean, if a spam targets only 20,000 employees, they will still have to spend the 5*20,000 seconds to collectively delete the single spam that an admin could take care of at the root (also saving bandwidth and storage space). Throw in the issues of employees working with slow computers and slow connections and I can definitely see a full-time spam admin.