I had not thought about email Spam mail in ages. It used to be that whenever I logged into my email, including my school email accounts, the vast majority of my emails were unsolicited junk—advertisements for Viagra or other drugs available on the cheap through online “pharmacies,” offers for cash in exchange for sending emails, get rich quick schemes and emails with provocative subject headings that led to XXX websites.
Earlier this week The New York Times published an article chronicling a drop in the past month of about 50 billion email spam messages per day. There still remain about 200 billion spam messages in circulation daily, a staggering number, especially considering that my inbox is only clogged these days by the various updates, newsletters and advertisements to which I have subscribed or agreed to, whether wisely or otherwise. Regardless, they have been solicited.
According to the Times, Russia, a “haven” for cyber criminality has become a major exporter of spam due in large part to the alleged work of “spam kingpin” Igor Gusev. Although he denies a connection, Gusev is widely believed to have run SpamIT.com, which paid spammers to promote online pharmacies. The SpamIT operation closed inexplicably on September 27th and was followed by the 50 billion messages per day curtailment of junk mail sent by spammers. It turns out the Russian government, which has traditionally been lax in its prosecution of cyber crime, had cracked down and charged Gusev not with cybercrime but with operating a pharmacy without a license and failing to register a business.
As someone who had not thought about spam in years, I was amazed at the amount of junk mail that is sent daily and also the amount of spam for which one man seems to have been responsible. Users like me no longer feel the effects of spam due to the ubiquity of spam filters.
Thus, I wondered why I should care about spam and its continued use. It seems that an increased use of spam filters should be followed by a loss of incentive to use spam as a marketing tool. Who is still a) receiving this spam and b) investing in the products advertised? Clearly those people exist since Gusev is reported to have earned 120 million dollars from his company. As long as spam still reaches even a limited audience, it seems likely to continue. There is little cost associated with email spam. Once hackers have lists of email addresses, emails just need to be sent. Any kind of more legitimate advertising is clearly more costly—both economically and in terms of time—paying hosts to post the advertising, making paper copies, phone calls, walking from bulletin board to bulletin board to hang signs. As long as people open spammed email messages and make purchases, spamming is clearly a cost-efficient, if illegal, method of marketing.
However, the costs are borne by the rest of us. Due to the fact that different countries have different laws or policies regarding the use of spam, it is difficult to mitigate the effects. We have to bear the costs of providing and operating spam filters and tracking the use of spam. Moreover, in terms of privacy we are still reminded that hackers continue to gather our information for these uses. The New York Times also writes that spam accounts for 90% of all email traffic on the internet. I cannot help but wonder in what ways the internet would be a difference place in a spam-less world.