Notorious 'spam king' Robert Soloway has pleaded guilty to additional charges (fraud and tax evasion) related to his previous conviction for sending out huge volumes of Spam.
US Department of Justice indictment against Soloway:> www.usdoj.gov/usao/waw/press/2007/may/soloway.html
Seattle times article on Soloway's guilty plea on the new charges:> http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004283998_spamking15m.html
The question to the reader therefore is 'Do you think that this sentence will result in less spam to your inbox?' Sadly the answer is probably 'no' as the trend in Spam is still increasing and human nature, on both sides of the equation, being what it is won't change.
There are a number of sites you can go to if you want to look at Spam trends and one such site is
Barracuda Central:
www.barracudacentral.com/index.cgi?p=spam You can go there if you want to look at the pretty graphs but the number that jumps out at me is that worldwide the number of messages processed by all
Barracuda Anti-Spam Firewalls yesterday was over 2 Billion. 2,277,470,908 to be exact and of that number the vast majority or 2,170,841,992 (95.32%) were blocked as Spam. This is in contrast to the same statistics a year ago where the number of messages processed per day was around 1 Billion per day and the Spam percentage was around 92%.
Sadly, the Spam mix is still about 50% off-brand pharmaceuticals and about 25% knockoff products which tells you what is profitable to the Spammers. If people stopped responding to these advertisements and voted with their cash then the Spammers would not be profitable and would have to look elsewhere for their next easy meal.
Will human nature change overnight? Probably not. Consumers want a good deal and are not likely to change and the Spammers have found a financial niche that they fit into so expect the volume of Spam to continue and even increase as the effectiveness of
anti-spam solutions like the Barracuda appliances, which
CudaMail is powered by, makes the Spammers job that much harder. They will ramp up their efforts to sneak Spam past such solutions rather than change their nature.
- Shaun