Log in ....Tribune

Monday, February 9, 2004 		Feature

Some Pretty Amazing Mail (SPAM) facts

AN OECD report prepared for an OECD-EU hosted workshop on the problem provides many facts and figures in an attempt to measure the extent of spam:

  • An EU study estimates that the worldwide cost to the Internet subscribers of spam is in the vicinity of $ 12.5 billion a year.

  • One survey suggested that 65 per cent of the Internet users spent more than 10 minutes per day killing spam, and 24 per cent said they spent more than 20 minutes per day.

  • One study, assuming that 10 per cent of corporate e-mail is spam and that each employee spends 30 seconds per day killing it, the annual cost to a company with 10,000 staff would be $ 6,75,000.

  • A report in June 2003 from the Radicati Group forecast that e-mail spam would cost companies `80 20.5 billion in 2003 and $ 198 billion annually by 2007.

  • Another study, by Ferris Research, estimates that e-mail spam cost US businesses $ 8.9 billion in 2002. The Australian Office for the National Economy has calculated that the total cost of time spent per employee in a company merely in managing spam in the e-mail box is about $ 620 per year.

  • Some research suggests that spam adds 10 per cent to costs for Internet service providers.

  • A US Federal Trade Commission report in April 2003 found that 66 per cent of spam messages were fraudulent in some way.

  • The US Secret Service has designated the so-called ‘Nigerian scam,’ in which the sender offers to pass on windfall sums of money if a percentage payment is made in advance, as an ‘epidemic,’ defrauding people of hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

  • Studies by anti-spam companies indicate that in July 2003 spam accounted for half of all e-mail traffic from 8.0 per cent in 2001, that 4.9 trillion spam shots would be made in 2003.

  • AOL blocked 2.37 billion spam messages per day in April 2003.

  • International Data Corporation estimates that there are about 700 million electronic mailboxes in the world, and the total will be 1.2 billion in 2005. Trade data suggests that about 31 billion e-mail messages were sent on the Internet in 2002 and that the traffic will exceed 60 billion in 2006.

  • Research suggests that the costs of obtaining one e-mail address is 0.00032 US cents and that the cost of sending is 0.01-0.05 cents

  • One study found that 3.5 million messages, at a probable cost of less than $ 100 per million, generated 81 sales, each worth $ 19 or a total of $ 1,500, in the first week, on a take-up rate of only 0.0023 per cent.

  • Estimates indicate that 90 per cent of viruses are sent via e-mail.

  • In 2003 Microsoft launched dozens of lawsuits in the US and Britain against companies that had sent its customers more than two billion spams. — AFP

Spam’s new shelter — cellphones
D. Young & Y.I. Kane

If you thought your spam problems couldn’t get any worse, check your mobile phone.

Cellphones are becoming the latest target of electronic junk mail, with a growing number of marketers using text messages to target subscribers in Asia.

Mobile phone spam has yet to approach anything like the volume of the e-mail variety, but the problem is growing in a region where the average user sends as many as 10 SMS (short message service) messages a day.

"SMS spam is certainly something that people are focusing on, particularly in markets like Japan where it is a common problem," says Jeff Bullwinkel, a spokesman for Microsoft Corp, which is spearheading a worldwide anti-spam campaign. "It’s big in markets where mobile communications are prevalent."

Mobile phone companies were reluctant to talk about the trend, but evidence of the problem abounds on the Website of NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s biggest mobile phone company.

The site carries cautionary words about a junk message regarding the need for B-negative blood for a child’s operation, and instructions to forward a chain-mail or face financial consequences.

The phone company also warns of messages claiming to come from DoCoMo asking people to send money to a particular bank account.

Individual users face difficulty blocking such messages because of their random origins, although DoCoMo lets users set accounts to receive only messages from specified sources.

SMS spammers in Japan typically find their prey by generating at random the e-mail style addresses used for text messaging in the country, a DoCoMo spokesman says.

DoCoMo — whose users send and receive 10 messages a day on average — is fighting SMS spam through measures such as blocking huge quantities of messages that lack specified recipients, he adds.