Intellectual Property Law

Spam gets 1 response per 12,500,000 emails

By Ann Bartow

Tech Radar reports:

A new study details how spammers ? the bane of our email inboxes ? still make pots of money, despite only receiving a response to one in every 12,500,000 emails they spam out.

The study, by a team of seven computer scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD) infiltrated the Storm network, which uses hijacked home PCs to relay much of the junk email you spend your days wading through while wondering ‘who the hell responds to this stuff?’

Well. Now you know. One gullible idiot in 12,500,000 recipients. Or thereabouts. …

The bait? You had to ask?

Using ‘proxy bots’ the team of researchers managed to control 75,869 hijacked machines to conduct their own fake spam campaigns.

The researchers used two of the most popular ploys currently used by spammers ? firstly offering a fake pharmacy site and, secondly, offering a herbal Viagra-style remedy to boost libido.

“After 26 days, and almost 350 million email messages, only 28 sales resulted,” says the research paper.

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Full post as published by Madisonian.net on November 12, 2008 (boomark / email).