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Confession For Two: A Spammer Spills it All
defender writes "Rejo Zenger, well known Dutch anti-spam activist, recently had a very frank talk with a (now retired) spammer. He got information as to how and why S. Pammer started, where and why he was kicked out, who helped him get his bulletproof hosting, his open proxy mailings etc. It gives a nice and concise view of what the costs for a smalltime spammer are. About 200 Euros for the hosting and ability to spam at least half a million addresses (in a months time). That's for a turnover of 6 times and a net profit of well over twice those initial spam-related costs. Complete with screenshots, of course."
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I am pleased however that more proactive steps are being taken by organisations such as Spamhaus in addressing the problem by both a technology and policy driven approach in combatting the problem. And that more prosecutions are happening. But I don't see the tide being turned anytime soon.
As for the internet dying, I don't see it. There is now to much commercial interest in it for corporations to sit idly by and do nothing about SPAM and other problems we encounter on the internet. Even our governments misguided steps at regulation, show that the internet is here to stay. It may transform in the future but I don't see it dying just yet.
You, sir, are clearly a filthy stinking spamming scumbag, or a troll, or both. However, for benefit of the lurkers out there who might actually be misled by your lies, I'll take some time to refute them:
... and not one of them has paid a penny to me, or to my clients, for any addresses they find. The only person paying anything to anyone is me, for the bandwidth they're using in order to gather those addresses, and my clients, who (like all end users) are the ones who end up paying in the end.
Spam is fundamentally identical to telemarketing and direct postal mail.
Spam is nothing like telemarketing or direct postal mail. It is fundamentally identical to telemarketing to your cell phone where you have to pay for airtime. It is telemarketers calling collect and no option to hang up, postage due junk mail with no choice to refuse to pay.
The money telemarketers pay for those calls goes to the companies that carry the network traffic, namely the local and/or long distance phone companies. The telemarketer pays for the network resources they use.
The cost of handling bulk mail is less than what the Post Office charges to send it. The profits the Post Office makes from the bulk mailers pay for the hardspace "network" resources for everyone else.
Spammers do not pay for the resources they use. I've seen recent figures as high as 4 out of 5 emails sent are spam. To look at it another way, this means that if your ISP allocates $10,000 of their revenues to buy some new mailservers, then you, their customer, are only getting the benefit of $2,000 worth of new hardware; the other $8,000 is spent to deliver spam. Since that money is coming from you and other subscribers, then your ISP either has to raise your rates or not give you the increase in service they otherwise would have. If $1 a month out of your bill goes for hardware upgrades, you're getting 20 cents worth and the rest is going to deliver spam.
Spam in no way subsidizes the Internet. The spammers are not paying for the resources they use. They are forcing other people to pay to handle traffic that they do not want. They are forcing every ISP out there, from the big backbone providers to SouthPodunkNet, to shoulder the cost of their advertising. The only money a spammer pays to actually support the network is the cost of a cheap dialup account somewhere. All the rest is paid to other scum for things like lists of email addresses, access to innocent people's hijacked computers, etc. But he is using 10^6 or more of the network resources as everyone else.
When you give your email to a website operator, and that website operator sells it, that money is what keeps your content cheap or free.
Very, very, very few addresses used for spam are those given voluntarily to a website operator. In fact, out of the hundreds of email addresses I've used with various websites and companies, I've gotten spam at exactly one: the one I gave to iBill. The vast majority of addresses used by spammers are extracted from web pages, forum posts, domain registration information, and just about anywhere else.
I watch spammers' spiders scanning domains that I host
Then there are the dictionary spams. Some hijacked computers in Brazil have been bombarding one of my domains all day with spam to random non-existant addresses, trying to find some that get through. People who don't even exist certainly didn't give their email addresses to anyone!
As it happens, I'm the webmaster as well as host for a site with a fair bit of free content, so I think I am in a position to know something of the economics of it. It works like this:
Neither I nor my client has ever received a single penny from a spammer. This particular client happens to have a mailing list (extremely opt-in, and protected like the vault at Fort Knox) for a newsletter. If he should wish to sell it to a spam list vendor, just how much would a list of under a hu
Spam is not a matter of 20 mails a week, it is a matter of hundreds a day and rising. A friend of mine whose email address was compromised by being listed on his college website recently had to abandon that address, and try to contact everyone who knew him to give them his new one, because he was getting 500+ spams a day: over 99% of his email.
The cost of sending snail mail keeps it to a reasonable level. It also means that it is generally very tightly targeted. For example, I subscribe to a gardening magazine, so I get seed catalogs. I do not even have a penis, so I have very little use for penis enlargement pills, let alone fake Viagra and pictures of naked women (with or without horses involved). But because there is effectively no cost to the spammer, I am bombarded with advertisements for all of the above.