Understanding and Reversing the Profit Model of Spam

Spam, or unsolicited e-mail, has become a tremendous problem in recent years, evolving from being a minor nuisance as late as year 2000 to today comprising on average over 80% of all enterprise e-mail traffic and costing billions of dollars in lost productivity worldwide. It has become the parasite that infected the e-mail macrocosm and many now fear will lead to its destruction; the host becoming obsolete under the enormous harm done to it by the parasitic influence of this symbiotic relationship. While the news headlines continue to cite the increase in daily spam volumes, we suggest that the war against spam is reaching its final stages. Historically, before a war officially ends there is a key turning point which leads to victory. In the war on spam, we argue that we have reached that turning point. Solutions have been proposed to “reverse the profit model” of spammers by charging for email[8]. We show that such a drastic overhaul of the e-mail system through the deployment of these solutions is not essential to accomplishing this goal. We begin by exploring the motivation of spammers and reviewing the detrimental effects of spam on the Internet. We then present a model of the profitability of spammers showing how various anti-spam initiatives affect it. We show that in fact, all the ingredients of an impending solution to the spam problem, such as near universal deployment of constantly technologically advancing anti-spam filtering technologies, improved user education, establishment of legal frameworks and aggressive enforcement of those frameworks, are already known and are at various stages of implementation.