Greg Linden, an ACM blogger, recently asked if the war on spam has been won. He wrote,
Today, e-mail spam appears to be a solved problem. A 2003 study External Link put response rates at 0.005%. A 2008 study External Link where the authors infiltrated a major spam botnet found response rates had fallen to under 0.00001%, only 28 sales out of 350 million messages sent. Spam filters appear to have forced down response rates three orders of magnitude in five years. Spammers have fought back with misspellings, adding additional text to mails, trying to customize each e-mail sent, and many other tricks to evade detection, but their increasingly complicated efforts have not been able to outwit the filters.
Similarly, Daniel Hamermesh, a Freakonomic Blogger, wondered where are his Viagra spam.
I haven’t gotten one of these in a year, after often getting several a day. I assume that the spammers realized that the return per period of time the price of the activity was less than its marginal cost: the opportunity cost of their time. They have shut down the business and moved to other activities that might yield higher returns.
Today, over 90% of the messages a typical company receives are spam. Bigger companies or government agencies get more than 98%. Spam is the AIDS of email. There are some effective treatments, but it is far from being eradicated.
Seen the movie You Got Mail? Everybody likes to to receive messages. They publicize their email addresses to get more messages. They register for services, subscribe to mailing lists, or comment on public sites. They also participate various forwarding schemes, like chain letters, memes, and many urban legends. Was it was great to get the free dinner coupon at the nice restaurant?
Statistics makes the problem difficult. With today’s spam volume, a 99.8% capture rate gives a typical user less than one spam message a day. When the capture rate is 99.6%, a mere 0.2% decrease, half of the inbox will be spam.
Only economy will win the war on spam. As long as sending email is free, there will always be spam. Before that changes, demand your ISP to have a quality spam blocker. Make sure your company stop spam at the gate. Strengthen your defense with a good email client that has a spam filter. Lastly, before yelling at your spam solution provider, check if you actually asked for those messages yourself. Try as they might, those software engineers cannot know that you changed your mind and don’t want the restaurant promotions anymore, at least not until you are in the mood for a nice juicy steak again.