* Getting into spam business is frighteningly inexpensive
In checking the quarantine area of my spam filter last week, I came across an advertisement for products that help people produce spam.
Here’s what they’re offering: software that will automatically set up 10 e-mail servers on your computer from which you can broadcast spam messages at the rate of up to a million per day; a tool that will extract e-mail addresses from newsgroups, Web sites and other online sources; 28 million fresh e-mail addresses; documentation and technical support.
And you get all of this for only $149!
What this means is that you can send spam to 28 million people at a cost of only $5.32 per million e-mails sent. If you sell a product for $19.95, your sales rate needs to be only one in nearly 1.9 million spam messages sent to get a 100% return on your investment! Plus, since these tools don’t require any ongoing maintenance fees, your cost per e-mail message will continue to drop as you send more e-mail using this package.
This package demonstrates how easy it is for virtually anyone to get into the spamming business. The barriers to entry for spamming are lower than for virtually any other business activity, which explains why spam has become such an enormous problem over the past few years.
The good news is that the problem is easily solved by installing spam-blocking tools somewhere in the e-mail chain, preferably at the gateway or server so that spam never reaches the recipient. At a more macro level, as has been discussed in this column before, spam-blocking tools may ultimately change the future economics of spam. As shown in the example above, a spammer can make a 100% return on a $149 investment with a sales rate of only one in about 1.9 million spam messages sent. However, if all of the potential recipients had a spam filter that blocked 95% of spam, then that spammer would have to achieve a sales rate of one in about 95,000 – an increase of 20 times – to achieve the same return.
