Fix spam

SPAM - why do they bother?

I read an interesting article today on spammers and the success rates for junk email.

Apparently the hit rate for spam is one in every 12.5 million emails sent!  

Not a great return you would think but when you are sending Billions of emails every day, you can actually make yourself very rich very quickly.  To do this the researcher took control of a Bot Net (a group of PC’s that have been taken over by spammers) and ran a trial sending out messages.  They also created Pharmacy site so any dumb individuals who took up the offer could pay for the product.

While running their spam campaigns the researchers sent about 469 million junk e-mail messages. The majority of these were for the dodgy pharmacy campaign.

After 26 days and almost 400 million email messages, 30 sales resulted.

 However when you scale this up to billions of emails sent every day you can see sildenafil the sales figures will increase rapidly. 

We have been dealing with this junk email problem for some time for customers and have tried a number of solutions.  We started with GFI Antispam and then moved to Kaspersky Antispam but found them a pain to administer and not very accurate.  They also slowed down servers and created havoc with internet connections as so much traffic was being sent to the servers. 

We also had issues with the blacklisting of IP addresses and reverse DNS lookup.  Eventually we found a service new from Microsoft called Exchange Hosted Services, it’s basically the same service offered by Messagelabs but for considerably less and without the onerous contract terms (they always want 3 years!).   

This has been a god send, we don’t get any problems with the service, it’s quick to setup, never goes wrong and is hosted offsite so we have no relay or Internet performance issues.  It’s also cheap at £2 per user per month with no contract!