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Spamming Becoming Financially Infeasible
itwbennett writes "Making money in spam isn't as easy as it used to be. 'It's not something financially feasible for anyone to even consider,' said Robert Soloway, who in his heyday made $20,000/day as a spammer. 'Spam — the Internet's original sin — dropped for the first time ever at the end of 2010,' writes IDG News Service's Robert McMillan. 'In September, Cisco System's IronPort group was tracking 300 billion spam messages per day. By April, the volume had shrunk to 34 billion per day, a remarkable decline.' Soloway says spam filters have become too good."
It may have hit a slump, but it’ll be back.
People en-masse haven’t gotten any smarter. There are still enough people who will fall for scams and do business with the kind of people who advertise via spam. Some good tech is currently making an effective barrier between the idiots and the spammers, but the idiots are still there, so the profitability is still there. Give the bad guys a little time. They’ll come up with new ways of getting around our current filters.
Of course the other theory is that spam has become “less interesting” in light of other new and exciting ways of screwing with people. Once those dry up though, I think the guys with the suits will fall back on classic reliable spam to make their money.
People have been working on increasing the cost and decreasing the reward from spamming for some time now. From discouraging people from buying from spam messages to grey listing, to shutting down botnets, all of that has been largely for the purposes of making it less attractive to spam.
I'm just a bit surprised that it's starting to have an effect, it's hard to compete with basically free server capacity and bandwidth.
Not everyone needs $20,000 a day. Average income in China for example is only a couple thousand dollars US. Costs are lower over sea and profits can be lower while still maintaining financial feasibility.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
It's not that they've gone legit. It's that there are easier ways to scam people out of their money for higher profit returns, such as spear-phishing.
I8-D
Yeah. Half my email ends up in a SPAM bucket. Thanks, you bastard. If I want someone to actually receive a message I have to send it through Facebook or SMS.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
but in my accounts it still comes in as a flood. Some of it is clearly malware coming in - others are questionable scans plus the usual Nigerian nonsense.
It depends on your definition of "spam". By my definition, I get more spam than ever. The difference is that much of it is from legit companies who comply with the CAN-SPAM law. I can opt out, but I'm getting about 100 or more of them a day, and I can't spend all day opting out of every single one of them. It may be legal, but it's still spam, as far as I'm concerned.
Proverbs 21:19
http://www.ecocycle.org/junkmail/index.cfm
Works surprisingly well.
sic transit gloria mundi
The term "spam" as used to represent junk e-mail wasn't originally an acronym. They took the term 'spam' from the classic Monty Python sketch about spam, because it represented something unwanted. "I don't like spam!"
Believe me, advertising people will jump on any chance they see to sell some more ads, and there's a sucker born every minute who will pay for those ads to be distributed.
Aren't most of the spam kings either dead, retired, or in jail at this point? I hear it's lonely in Boca Raton these days.
And wasn't there a wave of murders in the former Soviet Union when Microsoft and Time-Warner/AOL decided they were no longer going to ignore spammers? Bunch of free-lance software developers with connections to organized crime found dead, as I recall; the rumor was that the spam kings were eliminating people who knew too much.
Well, regardless of the truth or falsehood of any of these tales and rumors, if corporate pressure has made spamming unprofitable, I'm certainly not complaining. It's about time the f***ing invisible hand did something besides j***ng off US Congressmen.
If this keeps up this could be the end of western society as we know it. I really hope the powers that be can come up with a reasonable bailout strategy for the spammers. They are to big to allow to fail.
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
I've heard that 'spam' subsidizes the entire USPS. Without the revenue generated by 3rd class bulk rate, first class postage would probably be about $2 USD per letter (allegedly.) Thus spam keeps your letter carriers coming around every day, except Sundays.
Of course, that was several years ago. I've also heard that email has decimated the first class postage business, so the proportional subsidy is now probably much higher than that.
John
Oh the irony. The spammer must regret having sent all those "penis enlargement" ads when landing in prison.
GMail? SMTP Relay services? It's nearly impossible to actually run your own mail server now-a-days anyways, unless you want to jump through all the hoops required (DNS records, etc). I personally had a need for it not too long ago, I had a connection that was intermittent at best but we needed local e-mail as well. We simply set up our own server on the LAN and paid for an amazon ec2 instance that simply forwarded all incoming and outgoing mail for us.
Local music(to upstate NY). http://gnarfel.com/ radio.
At least you can make some attempt to redeem yourself with spamhaus. Cisco's shitty IronPort lists me as having a "poor" reputation because 6 or 8 sites in my A block have a "poor" (and totally unexplained) reputation. Me? Perfect. Not blacklisted on any of the 130 or so lists. But I can't send email to godaddy because they use the ironport abomination. (Godaddy, yeah I know, right? It's the principal of the thing.)
Cisco is Cisco. "Don't blame us, we didn't block anything, we just told THEM not to trust you, go figure."
Godaddy is godaddy. "If you think this block is in error, go fuck yourself".
Anybody else run into this? I didn't think I could hate Cisco any more than I already did but I was wrong.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Maybe I've just been lucky, but it is quite easy to run your own SMTP server here in Florida on Road Runner. They don't restrict in/outbound SMTP, so you can pretty do much whatever you want. Even if they did block outbound SMTP (which I think is a halfway decent idea), there are plenty of services out there that will provide SMTP relay service for you, either on nonstandard ports so you can get by firewall rules, or via VPN, so the firewall can't even see the traffic. Last I checked, these services were a few bucks a month or something like $100/year. If you need to run your own mail server for business purposes, this shouldn't be too burdensome, plus you get the benefit of redundant smart hosts, so you don't have to worry about your ISP's mail server going offline.