Spam? Does Anyone Actually Make Money on It?
 

"Enlarge your penis with discount Canadian drugs and discount cigarettes at home in your spare time to earn big money and a free Ipod by helping Nigerian bank officers move millions of dollars into penny stocks for Bill Gates' email research project!"

I can't wait to get that one. But I really don't understand why there's so much of it around. Spam. I run *two* spam filters, one at my mail server and one on my email client, and still two or three a day slip through, even after months of filter training. I estimate that I receive about four to five hundred spam emails per week, or about eight times the legitimate email I get.

What I want to know is this: Is someone actually making money off of this crap? Are there any statistics out there that tell us how much is earned by spammers moving their crap "products"?

The vast majority of people I know filter or simply delete spam without so much as a glance. The only benefit to it has been a marked decrease in the amount of junk snail mail I get.

How many people will have to go to prison before this stops...or at least slows down? Will it help if I volunteer to drive them to Leavenworth?

Yeah, I think they do. I don't remember the names, but I've seen articles on slashdot about guys who have gotten rich spamming.

The deal is that there is almost no cost involved to the sender. Once the spam engine is cranking out, you can send out millions almost as cheap as sending one. All it takes is for a small fraction of the recipients to take the bait.

Don't they have to pay for the use of the "mailing lists"? :confused:

They only have to collect (or buy) each address once.

OK, I was under the impression there were people that make a living renting out mailing lists.
Also, any idea how many of the spam senders actually have a product they are selling rather than just being emailmen or advertising agents for others? :confused:

I remember reading an (anonymous, of course) interview with a spammer. Supposedly, it was a woman who spammed sales of printer cartridges. She specifically said that all it took was one sale per million emails to make a profit.

A spammer can steal everything they need to get started. Sometimes lists are sold but bots can trawl the web and extract e-mails to solicit (which is why many do user_at_isp.com or moc.psi@resu to obscure their address). Sadly the world is in no short supply of idiots who fall for spam.

i wonder if you added up all the time wasted reading spam while at work. how much Money the bosses lose of time wasted by their employeys.

They eat tons of it in Hawaii.

As someone explained once, the spam is there because that's where the money is. Believe it or not, there are people out there who regularly by stuff they found out through spam.

Those people are the problem, without them spam would disappear. :mad:

I haven't tried to figure that out--I lack all the relevant data--but I can tell you, as the Director of IT for my employer, that we just spent $2500 to purchase a Barracuda spam filter appliance (which I'd highly recommend, by the way.. tho I expect it would be overkill to have one at your house. At least for most people!). Prior to that we were paying a couple hundred a month for an outside service. And those were relatively cheap compared to other options I considered. Figure in how much time I spent researching the options, setting stuff up, etc. Blech. I don't feel like doing the math....

90-95% of mail sent to us is blocked because it's spam or has a virus.

They are also responsible for the proliferation of "Paid Programming" that fills my channel listing after midnight. I think they are all like that lady in Napolean Dynamite who spoke on behalf of many with her concise and to-the-point "I want that."

Speaking of Paid Programming, let's put a list together of pitch people we would like to see... uh... hmmmm... catapulted into deep space:

I'll start:

Billy Mays (some one please put the end of his pigtail in a garbage disposal)
Gunther Renky (the kitchen device guy)
That perfect hair real estate dude
John Basedow (the -2% body fat dude)
The bald guy who sells Orik (sp?) vacuums.

I can't contribute any names, because I don't watch them. ;)

And I'll bet you that their company pays for a good deal of spam, just to increase the need for their BIG money-maker.