Celebrating Spam's Ten-Year Anniversary 275
khalua writes "Netcraft has a story that 10 years ago today, the first widely recognized spam was sent by... oh the irony...a law firm. Hate to see what a beast it grows into when it's 20." Reader prostoalex writes "Ever wonder why spam is so prevalent and who buys all those revolutionary products sold at unbelievable prices? Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail. The average buy was $155, which exceeds the average of $114 that opt-in e-mail generated. It's worth noting that US e-commerce sales in general generated $50 billion total last year, however, the data was presented by a different researcher."
$11.7 billion... (Score:5, Insightful)
Celebration? (Score:5, Insightful)
makes me wonder (Score:1, Insightful)
"Direct Marketing Association estimates $11.7 billion was spent on goods and services pitched via unsolicited e-mail."
makes me wonder how many billions were spent on wasted hours deleting the garbage, & how many billions have been wasted on network arcitechture to carry the load.
Re:here's a good mail filter (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:kinda scary... (Score:5, Insightful)
We're aiming at the wrong people (Score:5, Insightful)
now go ahead and mod me flaimbait or troll you useless dickweeds!
Re:$11.7 billion... (Score:2, Insightful)
Is this some Soviet Russia thing?
A Grain of Salt... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or how about a ton of salt.
What's that? The *Direct Marketing Association* released a report saying that spam sales accounted for $11.7 billion?
But wait, isn't the DMA the very organization that represents the interests of the spam houses?
Gee, I wonder if they would have an interest in convincing people [particularly retailers] that spam is a successful form of advertising?
And what's that you say? The $11.7 billion estimate is based on calls to 1000 consumers? I wonder how they decided which 1000 people to call? I'll give you a hint...I bet they didn't opt in.
Re:A Grain of Salt... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:here's a good mail filter (Score:2, Insightful)
The only solution to spam (Score:4, Insightful)
So how hard can it be to find exactly the companies that sold this stuff?
These are ultimately the companies that are responsible for spam. Why don't we hold them liable? I think I can proof that spam is costing me a significant amount of money (mostly lost time) even though I do have a fairly good working filter.
I hear all the time that we can't really get the spammers because they are in China, or recently because they use zombies/compromised boxes all over the internet. Well, at the end of the day, it's not the spamhouses that are responsible for this. If no-one paid them to spam, it wouldn't be a business.
So someone is paying money to get this spam to you. How come we can't go after them and make them pay?!
Re:*sigh*.... (Score:2, Insightful)
revenues (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:*sigh*.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference between email and IM is one of modes of communication, and they're both valuable modes. IM has immediacy; email has time-shifting. One does not entirely substitute for the other.
You're right that the spammers will not stop. They will shift to wherever the money is. If they find that they can no longer send email for free, then they will shift to IM, until that route is protected, too.
They're already starting to explore other domains. Spam comments have started showing up in people's web logs, and I'm sure there's a lot of it in Slashdot, too. We don't see much of it because it's mostly moderated down or rejected by the lameness filters, but when attention is turned to it, the war will escalate on that front.
The simplest solution, in all cases, is to accept only messages (whether IMs, slash postings, or emails) from known people. But email has a strong tradition of anonymity, and a valuable one. ACs in Slashdot can be anonymous informants inside a company. Or, far more likely, they're assholes. It's hard to tell without reading.
A friend of mine strongly believes that if it's worth saying, it's worth sticking your name on, and your neck out. She's never lived in China, or Afghanistan, so I can't say if she's right in the general case. But most of the time, she's right, and people afraid to communicate publicly are far more likely to be assholes than hidden geniuses.
Spammers can establish a short-term identity, but such identities can be, uh, identified. When receiving a message from, say, yahoo.com, ask the server how long this person has had the account, and whether its past behavior is spam-like. Does it receive emails? Does it reply to them?
Obviously it's not fully worked out, and even more importantly, it will take a long time for such things to filter through the entire Internet.
But I predict that in ten years, we'll have eliminated most forms of anonymity in email, and spam will be rejected at the server rather than filtered out. (I also predict that a lot of the burden of mass mail will be moved to RSS rather than email, but that's another story.)
Anonymity, sadly, will fall by the wayside. It'll still be there, but the anonymous informants will be ignored. It sucks to be inside the sort of tyrrany that make anonymity necessary, and I hate to pay the price of keeping them down, but I hope mechanisms will evolve (say, a chain of authentication) that will allow a form of anonymity without the downsides.
Meantime, get yourself a bunch of accounts, and give different accounts to different people, based on relationship and level of trust. In the future, your identity (and identities) will be one of the most valuable things you own.
Strange and unbelievable (Score:3, Insightful)
From a survey of 1000 respondants... $32.5 billion on solicited and unsolicited combined.
What's the U.S. population these days?
250,000,000?
$130 for every man, woman and child in the U.S.?
How much per household with a computer and an internet connection?
By email?
Based on a survey?
Of people who responded?
Of people who knew what email was?
Of people who knew what it meant to respond to an email?
Of people who knew the difference between a solicited and an unsolicited email?
Sponsored by the Direct Marketing Association?
I call BS.
Re:here's a good mail filter (Score:1, Insightful)
In reality, this is a *very* good idea. You know what mailing lists you are on, you have rules that put them where they belong.. Can you name any other email you want to keep that should have the term 'unsubscribe' in it ?
Re:That's Who (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not a stats major but I -was- a marketing major (I have since killed myself) and I very much doubt that DMA has a field of 1000 unbiased consumers in their survey, and a sample of 1000 to project 11 billion dollars of purchases? colour me sceptical.
I mean, "The Online Newspaper of Record for Online Marketers" sounds almost exactly like "spamdot: News for spammers" to me.
the survey is sketchy
the projections are sketchy
the source is sketchy.
my life remains unaltered.
Re:That's Who (Score:3, Insightful)
-Martin
Lie, Damned Lies, and ... (Score:3, Insightful)
The average buy was $155, which exceeds the average of $114 that opt-in e-mail generated.
What matters is not the average amount spent per transaction, but the average amount spent per email.
Re:Uh huh.... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not a spammer, but I'm a pretty good liar. You don't lie about things that are totally obvious, and that you have no reason to lie about. Such as saying that spammers spam because they make money that way.
This survey by the DMA... (Score:3, Insightful)