
Spam Not So Profitable? - chanux
http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3830011/Spam%20Not%20So%20Profitable.htm
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jacquesm
Sending out 300M+ spam messages to do research ? That's a little over the top
isn't it ?

~~~
michael_dorfman
Unfortunately, it's more like spitting in the ocean. As of 2007, the worldwide
spam estimate was about 100B messages _per day._

~~~
CWuestefeld
It's frustrating to consider on one hand the tremendous amount they're costing
in bandwidth, IT expenses, and lost productivity; and on the other hand, the
relatively trivial amount of money they're making for it.

Whatever became of CANSPAM? It seems like the government made a regulation,
declared victory, and went on to the next soundbite -- completely abandoning
the battle after preventing anyone else from fighting it through the legal
system.

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ableal
The lack of a citation in the article bothered me (just mentions "[a] new
report by researchers at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and
the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley"). So I searched for
the "magic" 347,590,389 number. It seems to be this Oct. 2008 paper by Kanich
et al.:

<http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ckanich/papers/spamalytics.pdf>

I also found a good summary (mentioning BBC reports ...) here:

[http://blog.mailchannels.com/2008/11/is-spamming-more-
profit...](http://blog.mailchannels.com/2008/11/is-spamming-more-profitable-
than-anti.html)

Amusingly, this submission's linked article, datelined (2009) July 15, is from
a site with a "realtime IT news" banner ...

