On Jul 16, 2006, at 1:00 AM, John Andersen wrote:
And yet, in spite of your statistics, there is more spam than ever.
Some estimates are that in excess of 95% of all email is spam.
I'm unconvinced of this -- my spam load has leveled off at 200 per
day. On the order of 1 per week makes it into my inbox. The latter
is due to SA plus some additional code for better white-listing
(which I'm planning to release as soon as I solve a couple issues).
The former is entirely out of my control (and note that my email
address is all over the place).
I suspect one or both of the following are true:
1. the volume of spam is linearly related to the number of email
addresses out there. the volume of ham is not: the amount of ham is
related to the amount of ham *sent* which follows an exponential
distribution. an increase in the number of users does not result in
an proportional increase of the amount of ham, but does result in a
proportional increase in the amount of spam.
2. spam will (or may have already) hit an economic equilibrium. you
could look at this as a supply and demand problem: spam "demand" is
the amount of people who are actually willing to buy things they get
offers for in spam. spam "supply" is the number of sellers who are
willing to sell things via spam. sending 200m messages still costs
money (albeit very little of it), and sending 800m messages to get
the same number of buys doesn't make sense for the spammer. whether
or not we have SA, Razor, etc., there comes a point where it isn't
worth spammers at large to send additional spam. spam filtering
increases the average cost of a sale to the seller, so the marginal
revenue of a spam run has to be higher for the mailing to be worth it.
-faisal
