Spam (part 1)

How many spam messages have you ever received?

I reckon I must get about 20 a day to my main account, even with the spam filters at Yahoo taking away 95% of them before they enter my inbox. The 20 that do get through means that I have probably had to deal with about 7300 in the last year. I never delete a non-spam email and I have received 7169 in the last 5 years to the same account, i.e I get 5 spam emails for every real email even when using a strict spam filter.

According to Sitepoint.com, new research from the University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego shows the Return On Investment for spammers. They took control of a botnet of 75,869 hijacked machines that actually send out spam for real spammers, and used it to advertise a fictitious pharmacy site. “After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted,”

This means the conversion rates on selling Viagra via spam is 1 in every 12 million or 0.000008%

What is surprising is that the infrastructure costs are so low, that the spammers still make profit on the one idiot out of 12 million and that is why we have to put up with spam. The researchers believed that high volume spam networks still generate up to $7,000 per day and $2 million per year.

Unfortunately, it’s true that there is one born every minute, so the spammers will keep annoying 11,999,999 people to get that one sale.