David Harris On Spam

Ace Suares writes "David Harris, maker of the free e-mail software Pegasus Mail, has written a white paper on spam as part of 'an active initiative to bring together a broad group of people who can promote education and legislation against spam in the New Zealand environment'."

Comments

Math lessons

[Phronesis]

From the white paper:

Imagine for a moment that a spammer promoting penile enlargement pills for $29.95 a bottle sends out ten million spams - a very moderate number by modern standards. If the spammer gets one thousandth of one percent sales response (.001%), he will sell 10,000 bottles, for a total return of $299,500.00. Even on response rates as small as one millionth of one percent, operations like this can still turn a profit that makes them worthwhile, simply because of the enormous number of addresses that can be reached at almost no cost.

Last time I checked 0.001% of 10^7 was 100, not 10,000. The spammer would sell 100 bottles for a total return of $2,950, not a huge haul.

At one one millionth of a percent response, he would sell on average one tenth of a bottle.

the cost is increasing

[chochos]

From the article:

simply because of the enormous number of addresses that can be reached at almost no cost

But the cost for spammers is (fortunately) increasing. We read here about a spammer having a DDoS with snail mail, about spammers getting their names and addresses published, about a spammer who was harrassed until he had to shut down his operation (in New Zealand, nonetheless).

Just last night there was this article posted and the /. effect was worse than usual... My guess is there was a DDoS attack performed with the scripts posted by some /.ers and the bulk club domain was removed from DNS servers (although you can still reach the site with the IP address).

So now a lot of people have names and addresses of many spammers, a spam support group site is under attack, perhaps some of these spammers can expect some harrassment over the next days... I hope they learn the lesson.

Re:the cost is increasing

[zcat_NZ]

..about a spammer who was harrassed until he had to shut down his operation..

we wish..
harassed == a few phone calls (only 20? wtf?!!)
shut down == switched to search-engine and referer spamming

Personally I think 'cost' is where the answer is, but not in the form of an email tax!

Every major ISP needs to clearly define what they consider 'spam', and then lay down enforceable rules about it such as "You WILL be charged a cleanup fee. You WILL be terminated immediately. Your name, company name, and known aliases WILL be publically blacklisted."

Unlike the elsewhere-proposed 'email tax', these costs would only affect spammers.