Economics of Spam

The spam economy is an interesting one, generating a lot of money for domain name registrars, and obviously generating enough sales for spammers to make the whole thing worthwhile.

I have seen it said that they are expecting returns as little one per million messages -- which still better than winning the lottery. Others, say the returns are much better, but with the increased use of anti-spam filters, they probably do need to send out millions of messages to have enough get through to have any kind of response.

Unless they are using networks of compromized computers, they are paying big bucks to ISPs for the use of their networks. I wonder how many ISPs wait until they receive a multitude of complaints before closing the account, instead of responding to the unusual outbound email activity. ISP accounts come in many flavors, but the ones with decent band width cost around $100 per month -- $119 without set up charges.

Then you have the domain names, which need to be bought. I received a spam today. I did a lookup on the domain and discovered that it was registered at GoDaddy. So, I took advantage of GoDaddy's willingness to consider complaints about spamming and sent them an email about the domain, including a copy of the email message. If GoDaddy closes the domain, which was created exactly one month ago, they will keep the $9.95 registration fee.

So, we are looking at perhaps U.S. $120 up front cost to per spam mailing. I say this is an upfront cost because even if GoDaddy does not kill the domain, it will be useless because it is now in virtually all anti-spam databases.

 

um...no offence, but i can send an email from my server from any domain I want.

You reporting a spamming domain to godaddy wont ban that person, unless you looked up what ip address they came from and did a reverse dns lookup. If thats what you did then go ahead and report it.

P

 

you can't jsut send spam emails, you have to a host that won't shut you off , usually in china or some place

its called a bullet proof server

msnbc has a good story on the ecomomics of spam

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3078642/

 

Yes of course. Im just saying, looking up the domain of where the email wont help, that can easily be faked.

 

That is the primary reason why spam is allowed to continue in the first place. The ISP companies are making a killing.

 

Good article. Its funny how many layers there are, its like they deliberately want to be able to deny all accountability...

 

I'd really like to know how to find someone in India, Russia, China, etc that can do several email blasts for me...

If you know anything about how or who, please get in touch.