Anti Spam - SpamUnit

For most people, spam is a simply an unwanted annoyance; something they delete when they check their morning email, without giving it much thought. For others, spam has grown to something of an obsession; figuring out where it comes from, how it works, and how to stop it. Of course, part of this discovery entails finding out just how extensive the problem is; the spam statistics discovered in the course of this research are very interesting indeed.

For example, some researchers estimate that just under 100 billion spam messages are sent worldwide every twenty-four hours as of June 2007. This is the culmination of a spam problem that’s grown exponentially year on year; February 2007 saw around 90 billion, while June 2006 estimates placed spam rates at 55 billion per day, up from a “tiny” 25 billion just twelve months prior. The number of email users, of course, has grown in that time - one estimate places the amount of legitimate e-mailers at around 1.5 billion - and the spam problem has grown with it.

What’s arguably even more worrying is how the spam is sent. Using a spam virus, spammers can infect computers and turn them into “zombie PCs”, churning out thousands of emails every day without the user’s permission or even their knowledge. While this was once a small-time issue, it’s grown a lot; as of late 2006, the vast majority of spam - over 80% - hit the network in this way, up from 50% the year before. The proportion has remained steady; spammers love this technique as it takes minimal resources for them personally, and also can keep law enforcement away as the true origin of the messages can be difficult to ascertain.

Of course, these numbers may not always be comprehensible to the end user. How can someone make sense of figures this large? An easy way to simplify matters is to look at it from a single person’s perspective. Spamnation looks at the case of an individual user with multiple email addresses, and how much spam has affected them over the years. Starting in 1996, spams numbered just a few each day until a sharp rise in 2003 saw the person receive 500 per day spread out over several addresses. The rise has continued at an alarming pace; they now receive over a thousand spams a day over their several addresses (for work, home, friends etc.), or an average of around 400 spams received per email address. Of course, these figures vary depending on how widely available any given address is, but it’s sobering just how quickly the spam problem is growing.

Another user, Paul Wouters of Holland, diligently tracked his spam receipts since 1997 until 2005. In that time, he received a grand total of 141,329 spam messages. Once again, 2003 was the terrible year, seeing a massive rise from 35 a day in January to 335 at the New Year. He calculated that the 2004 “haul” of spam would outnumber the previous seven years combined, showing the literally exponential nature of email spam. Such was the scale of the problem, and the difficulty of identifying what was truly spam, this excellent antispam crusader gave up his statistical gathering in 2005, yet remains committed to the fight against spam, linking it to organised crime.

And where there is crime, there is money. The spam industry statistics make for sobering reading. Much spam sent relates to adult sites or pornography, and this, of course, is a multi-billion dollar business, and a portion of this will directly come back to the spammer. The actual nature of spam income is difficult to ascertain - being as it is largely a criminal enterprise - but certain high-profile spammers are multi-millionaires. Indeed, so-called spam king Richard Alan Soloway, just one, single spammer, reportedly made at least $700,000 a year. He was not even the world’s top spammer, so one can only guess at the income of the truly huge gangs.

Even the world of antispam has interesting statistics. HiWAAY publicises its own spam killing statistics, and notes that, of the 1,500 messages killed per minute, most are blocked by reputation of the sender; this correlates to other statistics showing that spam is increasingly a centralised problem. Indeed, Spamhaus estimates that 80% of the world’s spam comes from 200 professional spam gangs located all over the world. The attempts to fight them are increasingly profitable, too; anti-spam software is currently made by over 100 companies, some with worths in the billions. And it’s clear to see why: some estimates - admittedly very high - place the cost of spam in the USA (due to lost productivity, software crashes, manpower requirements and even identity theft) at $10bn, while a 10 billion Euro figure applies in the EU. Whether these are overestimated or not is a matter of debate, but it certainly remains a huge problem, both with business spam and spam on home user PCs.

Finally, for a lighter touch that may delight Linux fans, Bill Gates allegedly receives 4 million pieces of spam a day, or 0.004% of the total spam worldwide.