Cost of Spam
There’s been a good bit of blogging and Twitting about a sudden increase in e-mail spam. Anyone know why this is. Bob Sprankle wrote about it (Spring Cleaning for Spam) in Bit by Bit, and referenced a blog post I wrote in 2006 (Sick and Tired) about the cost of spam. I commented on his blog with some stats that I use in one of my presentations these days.
There are lots of stats out there about spam. According to a study from Richi Jennings1 , Spam cost the world $50 billion in 2005, the U.S. about $19 billion. Projects are that for 2007, that number will double with $35 billion costs for the U.S.
To put this into perspective, acording the to Copenhagen Consensus2 , we could bring HIV Aids, world wide, under control for only $27 billion, less than we’ll spend protecting ourselves from spam. [Image3 ]
Tags: warlick, education, technology, spam
- Jennings, Richi, “Spam and Other Email Threats: Market and Technology Update.” Farris Research. 8 Jun 2007. Ferris Research. 9 Jun 2007 . [↩]
- Kerr, Roger. “hard-Hedadad Spending Decisions not Cold-Hearted.” BusinessROUNDTABLE. 2 Jul 2004. New Zealand Business Roundtable. 9 Jun 2007 [↩]
- Kaiser, Steve. “Spam.” DjBones’ Photostream. 24 Sep 2005. 27 Mar 2008 http://flickr.com/photos/djbones/46250610/. [↩]
The Cost of Spam by 2¢ Worth, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Anyone ever wonder if the anti-spam software group is behind all the spam? It would be a great piece of investigative journalism.
Reply to Charlie A. RoyDavid,
Reply to Roland O'DanielI’m not sure of the entire issue, but one of the main online directories that keeps track of spam domains experienced technical difficulty, during the week of March 24-28, and named all domains as spam rather than filtering as usual. Some anti-spam systems rely on that directory and a couple of others for their filtering. The misbehaving directory has been removed, which will now allow e-mail to go through but there will be a slight increase in spam that actually gets through also. That is one possible short term explanation.