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Spam Research Six Month Report

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the porn-nigeria-and-unrequited-crushes dept.

Zoomer writes "Every day, millions of people receive dozens of unsolicited commercial e-mails (UCE), known popularly as 'spam.' Some users see spam as a minor annoyance, while others are so overwhelmed with spam that they are forced to switch e-mail addresses. This has led many Internet users to wonder: How did these people get my e-mail address? In the summer of 2002, CDT embarked on a project to attempt to determine the source of spam. To do so, we set up hundreds of different e-mail addresses, used them for a single purpose, and then waited six months to see what kind of mail those addresses were receiving. The results offer Internet users insights about what online behavior results in the most spam. The results also debunk some of the myths about spam." Update: 04/12 15:47 GMT by CN : About a minute after this went live, I found that michael posted this earlier. Mea culpa.

1 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What I want to know.... by McDutchie · · Score: 5, Informative
    .... is the profile of the average spammer. Most of my spam is poorly spelled and frequently points to sites that don't have anything to sell. My suspicion, and I have no way of verifying it, is that most of these messages are sent by people who get suckered into a "Make Money From Home!" offer, send a few messages to a giant list of addresses, and then give up when they're not living in MC Hammer's mansion by the end of the week. Does anyone know who the average spammer is?

    At Spamhaus they know. Not only does Spamhaus run the SBL, the most widely used blocklist of spam sources in existence, they also run ROKSO, the block-on-sight public database of notorious spam gangs. This database is used by many ISPs for background checks when signing up clients. It's also used by the FTC and state Attorney General offices.

    According to Steve Linford, head of the Spamhaus team, 90% of the spam originating from America is sent by some 150 top spammers. If these were eliminated, our spam problem would virtually vanish overnight. This seems to contradict your suspicion that most spam is sent by suckers. In reality it's a small number of committed criminals that send most of it, and you can see all the publically available data on them at ROKSO. Go check it out - very educational indeed. So are many of Steve Linford's postings in news.admin.net-abuse.e-mail.