Does SPAM Work?
By JDFMonday, May 1st, 2006 at 5:51 pm
I was intrigued by a recent article on spam which I found at a website called CIO-today.com. The author basically argues that spam is invincible. She writes, “Although better technological controls have provided some measure of relief, spam still is responsible for about 70 percent of mail to consumers, according to the security firm Commtouch. For businesses, who tend to have better protections in place, the statistic is better, but not by much: 46 percent of the entire e-mail traffic into a company is spam, spam, spam.”
70 percent? That’s shocking. So we’re apparently now caught in an unending battle between the innovators on the spam side and the opposing forces trying to defeat spam. But the author makes an incredibly important point – emails are not being sent by a defect in the internet – spam is being sent by real people selling real products. Why?
I found a great book on this question called “Inside the SPAM Cartel: Trade Secrets from the Dark Side.” It’s by an anonymous author who calls himself “Spammer-X.” The tag line on the front cover reads, “You may hate Spammer-X, but can you afford to ignore him?” The book is partly designed for security types to learn about those sending spam, and partly an inspirational how-to guide for aspiring spammer-types (read: anyone with something to sell). In one class discussion someone suggested that no one is opening spam. But the statistics tell a different story.
Spammer-X describes one spam “case”: he bought two million email addresses for $200.00 (chapter 2). He runs the email addresses against a list of known “bad/filterable” lists and then sends 10,000 spam emails, using eight proxy servers, in 17 minutes. He’s able to track how many people whom he emailed visit the site he’s promoting (which happens to be a porn site in the case he describes). After 12 hours, he’s got 967 people to click onto his link. Many of those clicked from a “bulk mail” folder. And nearly all clicked to another page within the site. Out of the 967, one registers for monthly membership on the site. Spammer-X suggests that this case is fairly typical.
Nearly ten percent of the recipients clicked on a link from an unknown source. Spammer-X claims he made nearly $3000 for about 30 minutes of work. So his motivations are clear. But why are individuals responding? Spammer-X claims that he’s providing email readers with links they want but won’t admit they want.
So the basic answer to the spam question may be a lot like the war on drugs – as long as the spammers are selling what people want (as evidenced by the fact that people click through), we’ll keep spam. If we stop opening them, the spammers will stop sending them.