WE ARE GOING TO NEED a new way to think about spam, those importunate unsolicited e-mails advertising products, pandering to vices and insecurities, and bearing headers like GET LOLITA OUT OF DEBT BY ADDING THREE INCHES TO YOUR MORTGAGE! The problem is changing before our very eyes. Shortly after the turn of the year, I logged on to America Online's spam report and read that the company's new blocking software had for the first time diverted 1 billion unwanted e-mails in a single day. As this article went to press, I signed on again and found that AOL now routinely has days on which it blocks 2.3 billion pieces. When I wrote an article on spam in late April of this year, the freshest data showed that 70 percent of AOL's e-mail was spam. By the time David Streitfeld of the Los Angeles Times wrote a piece on the same subject a month later, the figure had risen to 80 percent. (It had been 50 percent in January.) Brightmail, which makes spam-blocking software, estimates that between January 2002 and March 2003, the percentage of e-mails that are spam nearly tripled, from 16 to 45 percent. Yahoo!, according to Streitfeld, has seen its spam level quintuple in the past year.
My mailbox at The Weekly Standard, spam-free a year ago, is now more than 98 percent unsolicited mail, entailing a 15-minute discard operation at the beginning of every working day. No one writing me a letter to the address listed on our
website should count on its reaching me. I've begun a gradual retreat from office e-mail, and will soon conduct my correspondence the way I did when The Standard was founded in 1995--via telephone and the U.S. Postal Service. Many Americans have made a similar retreat, finding that the extraordinary efficiencies that e-mail brought in the first half-decade they used it have evaporated--and in some cases have turned into inefficiencies. According to Britain's New Statesman, 13 percent of e-mail users have changed their addresses since the start of the year, in order to escape spam.
As the size of the problem changes, so does its nature. Two years ago spam was a joke. A year ago it was an annoyance. And a few weeks ago, Earthlink executive David Baker told a reporter that spam "has the potential to render the Net virtually unusable."
Spam is increasing because it is an easy way for dumb people--and a safe way for dishonest people--to make money. Once you have a reliable mailing list (and it is possible to buy target lists for as little as $500 per million names), then you can operate a permanent spamming operation at marginal cost approaching zero. This, in turn, means that response rates approaching zero can still turn a profit. A figure commonly bandied about is that only 1 in every 100,000 targets need respond to allow a spammer to make money. One occasionally reads of spammers getting rich off a 1-per-200,000 rate. When a spammer sends out a billion unwanted e-mails a day, as Alan Ralsky of Michigan and Boca Raton does, according to Computerworld magazine, he can get very rich indeed.
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