Spam is Money

The data is based on telephone interviews of adult internet users. It found that about 75% of them get spam daily. The average number of unwanted messages totals about 18. Users spend just under 3 minutes manually identifying and deleting the spam.

The study did not research what how people are trying to block emails they don't want.

At average income, the math works out to around $22 billion annually in lost cash.

The research indicated that about 1 in 6 people actually spend time reading the spam to see what they say. No indication if these people are just trying to reliably identify the spam - or if users are actually interested in buying.

About 1 in 25 has actually gone on to make an online purchased on a spam message. This is a disturbing number.

Spam costs very little money to send - and that 4% of people have actually directly lined the pockets of spammers suggests that controlling it will be extremely difficult.

Spammers don't spam because they're jerks. They spam because they're jerks who want money. With enough profit motive people will not only violate polite practice - they will readily break the law.

If arbitrary resources were to be allocated to government efforts to fight spam - it's possible that make some progress in stopping spam email. But if we end up spending billions of dollars per year on enforcement, you have to wonder if it's worth it. An analogy to the war on drugs comes to mind.

To control your own spam problem, consider a spam fighting software package such as SpamButcher. SpamButcher can be used with Outlook or Outlook Express as a Microsoft spam blocker, or with any other POP3 supporting mail client.

SpamButcher is a powerful antispam solution based on years of research into fuzzy logic and other technologies. By using more advanced systems than plain text filtering, SpamButcher can stop more spam than competing products.

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