On Wed, Jan 21, 2004, Shachar Shemesh wrote about "[OT]nesws regarding vigros chicks": > Here goes - spam is so common because the return on investment for > sending spam is so huge. You spend nickels sending millions of messages,
I think that the situation is many times different from what you describe. I think the spamming subculture has two strata (to similify things): call them "spam providers" and "spamvertizers". A spamvertiser has some business, scam or political idea that he wants to advertise, but no technical knowhow in sending out spam (amassing ISP accounts, building open relay lists, addresses, mail software, anti-filtering, etc.). So he contacts a "spam provider", a company that sells him "delivery of 10,000,000 copies for $1000" and pays them. The spam provider guarantees nothing beyond this - they do not guarantee any ROI. Often, I believe, the spamvertiser will find that he is getting mounds of hate mail, legal threats, and very little, if any, ROI, but he has already paid his $1000. Having seen the reprecautions, this spamvertiser may repent and not hire spam providers again - but there is a new sucker - and spamvertiser - born every minute. Sometimes the spamvertiser succeeeds (e.g., just ONE sucker falls for the 409 scam and sends $2000 to the spamvertiser), and continues to hire this spam provider. > and get several bucks in return from the 0.5% of actual buys. Recent > trends, however, are eroding this ROI away. Either because better > filters cause the number of people who buy to decrease, or because > striger control over open relays increase the costs of sending. We all > know that by now, of course. I believe that as much of 90% of the spam I get is unintelligable: either written in bizarre foreign language, as HTML-only, as pictures (that I do not watch), filled with obfuscating characters and words, and so on. Sometimes I even get spams without any sensible message at all. It doesn't seem to be bothering the spam providers, who are still making their buck. And frankly, it also doesn't bother my spam filter which still has a 99.5% suceess rate in recognizing spam. In fact, some of these obfuscation techniques just make the spams easier to spot (and harder to confuse for real message). > This is good because of another aspect of things. This suggests that > there are people who are running spam filters, and even baysian spam > filters, who actually buy stuff advertised in spam. In other words - > baysian spam filters are now common enough for ordinary "clueless" > people to use. Presumably, spammers only started doing these changes > because they saw their return dimminish. Another reason is possible: spam providers have to fight each other over their clients, the spamvertisers. Boasting more features like "filter avoidance" can improve their chances of getting clients. There might be no real need for those filter avoidance techniques. Just like peacocks evolved their long tails, without a "real" reason. > Then again, maybe not. For example - I'm confounded if I can understand > why spammers will vigorously spam people who ask to be removed. > Presumably, if someone asks to be removed, he is highly unlikely to ever > buy something from you. Spamming him again will only cost you the > (insignificant, but still) money, with almost no hope of seeing any > back. I'm not sure what this means about the above logic. Again, I can think of several reasons - one is my above provider/spamvertiser model. The provider gets paid by spam sent out, not by success ratio, so he doesn't care about the success of the spam. In fact, if the provider has a list of 10,000,000 addresses and suddenly half of them want out, he can now only boast 5,000,000 addresses and get half the money - a big lose for the provider. A related reason is the cost ratio. Writing software to handle "remove"s and the related computers costs money, which is hard to steal (like spammers do with most other resources they use). Sending out a few more copies of the spam costs very little, if at all. Another reason is the evidence trail. Having a real address for sending removal requests means that it is easier to trace the spam provider, which is naturally something they do not want. > For example, it may just mean that spammers want to spam. They don't > care whether people actually buy stuff. They spam like we write software. If this was the case, you'd see more "I Love ..." or "... was here!" type of spams. No, I think spam providers are actually making money. But my hunch is that most of this income comes from spamvertisers which invent the idiotic sales pitches we get in our inbox, not from the actual recipients of that email. -- Nadav Har'El | Wednesday, Jan 21 2004, 27 Tevet 5764 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-790466, ICQ 13349191 |There are 2 ways to do it - my way and http://nadav.harel.org.il |the right way ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
