Spamming Becoming Financially Infeasible 212
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."
This has been the strategy for a while (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Big corps have stopped tolerating spam (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Good news, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.