* * * * *
                                        
                         The Economics of Spam Part II
                                        
> Until late last year, Shiels was an e-mail spammer. The type demonized in
> every nook of American society. A prodigious Internet marketer, who from
> his Portland home sent up to 10 million unsolicited e-mail advertisements a
> day for other companies.
> 
> He said he made as much as $1,000 a week—and could have raked in a lot more
> if he hadn't quit the business in October, six months after he started. The
> path to spamming success requires expensive investments in software and the
> agility to adjust to the technological warfare between spammers and
> companies that try to block their messages. It also requires the stamina to
> withstand daily hate mail and even death threats.
> 
> Shiels decided a spamming career wasn't worth the personal cost.
> 

Via Disenchanted [1], “CONFESSIONS OF A FORMER SPAMMER [2]”

Very interesting article. When last I spoke [3] about the economics of
spamming, I was assuming a response rate of 1 per 70,000 and even there, it
showed that yea, you could make money at that rate. The article above talks
about a response rate of 1 per 10,000—much higher response rate and gives
more numbers than Paul Graham [4] did in his article.

We're talking 10,000,000 emails per day (sent out in 18 hours) with four
computers and two broadband connections; 150 emails per second (and contrary
to what I wrote [5] it would only take a month to send 250,000,000 emails via
broadband, not the four months via T3s I had worked out erroneously). And the
software to do this isn't cheap:

> He spent about $10,000 on software to harvest e-mail addresses, to disguise
> his online identity and to send millions of messages a day.
> 
> Shiels would not reveal the companies that make the proprietary software,
> and he said they are difficult to track down. They only accepted payments
> through wire transfers, Shiels said.
> 
> “I could tell you the name right now, and you wouldn't be able to find
> them,” he said.
> 

“CONFESSIONS OF A FORMER SPAMMER [6]”

But's it's sophisticated software—programs to harvest addresses from
websites, programs to scan for open relays and programs to send the actual
email via those open relays. But Shiels was able to make $1,000 per week
doing this so there is money to be made, which means this problem isn't goint
to go away any time soon.

[1] http://www.disenchanted.com/dis/technology/commodities.html?id=pzSyIWpU
[2] http://www.oregonlive.com/business/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/business/1
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2003/09/27.1
[4] http://www.paulgraham.com/wfks.html
[5] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2003/09/27.1
[6] http://www.oregonlive.com/business/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/business/1

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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