Have you ever thought about why you receive so much spam every day (for me it averages between 20 and 50 messages a day even after SpamAssassin has done its filtering)? Well, you can blame the 29 percent of Internet users that admit to purchasing items from spam email, according to a recent survey. Often these goods are pirated, counterfeit, or cheap knock-off’s that would be difficult to come by through the legitimate market.

More than 150 billion spam messages circulate daily, accounting for more than 85 percent of the total number of emails sent throughout the world. The sheer volume of spam consumes an enormous amount of bandwidth and remains one of the Internet’s biggest security problems.

And there’s little incentive to stop the spam. Recent FBI prosecutions of “bot-herders” suggest that the going rate is as little as $5 to $10 per million messages. Response rates are generally low – approximately 10 purchases are made for every million spam messages sent – but enough people purchase from spam to make it worthwhile for spammers to continue waging battle on your “Junk” folder in the hopes that one will slip through into your Inbox.

The top spam sellers include sexual enhancement pills, software, “adult material” and luxury items such as watches and jewellery.

The survey of Internet users was done by in June and July of 2008 by Marshal’s Threat Research and Content Engineering (TRACE) team. Marshal’s research indicates that just five botnets account for 80 percent of the world’s spam.

In 2004, only 20 percent of Internet users copped to purchasing items off spam email, according to a similar survey by Forrester Research. The increase in the last few years has led to a dramatic influx of spam email; reports indicate that global spam volumes doubled for the year ending June 2008 from the previous year’s levels.

The trend is not moving in the right direction as you’ve probably noticed. The question is how to fix it!? Maybe the ISP’s should be more active along with all hosting companies offering email services? What do you think could make this problem go away?

If one of these addresses begins receiving email they not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.

Help stop spammers before they even get your address!

To participate in Project Honey Pot, webmasters need only install the Project Honey Pot software somewhere on their website. We handle the rest — automatically distributing addresses and receiving the mail they generate. As a result, we anticipate installing Project Honey Pot should not increase the traffic or load to your website.

The more people that participate the better. Start now by creating an account and set up the code.

The first 400

The first spammer submitted 400 messages on 4th May 1978 to DEC-users – an early version of what we today call a PC (Personal Computer). The message was sent using ARPANET, the Internet’s ancestor.

Numbers are slightly up…

Since then SPAM has skyrocketed. Recent studies suggest that between 80 to 85 percent of all emails are SPAM. That would equal approximately 100 billion emails a day!

Most of it is caught by more or less intelligent SPAM filters. But for some reason we are still receiving special offers on Viagra, Cialis and letters from our “new” solicitor in Nigeria.

On the other hand I might consider it a compliment, as they are obviously grabbing content that would give them better ranking. This somewhat common SEO trick will fortunately only work for a while until enough people report the site as SPAM, and the site vanishes of the surface of the search engines.

Compliment or not I’m not going to support this parasite behaviour, and therefore I encourage everyone to block out and leave sitekreation dot com flying in the dark. I’m not even going to provide a link to the site as I don’t think it deserves it.

If your content was stolen by this or any other site please feel free to share what you did and what you felt. Good to get it out of your system they say…