Turning that junk email into a Porsche!
Payback is sweet. In a move that will give most email users a small sense of satisfaction, America Online has succeeded in obtaining a $47,000 2002 Porsche Boxster S as part of a settlement in a lawsuit against a spammer that (by AOL's estimation) made over a million dollars from spamming.
"We'll take cars, houses, boats - whatever we can find and get a hold of," said AOL's Randall Boe.
Although this may signal a turning point in the fight against SPAM, statistics reported on the popular site spamotomy.com report otherwise.
Some of the statistics from spamotomy.com are reported below, include attribution to the original source. Let us know if you think these are reasonable, and share your SPAM statistics and insight with us.
90% of all unsolicited email received by Internet users in Northern America and Europe is sent from roughly 200 offenders (Spamhaus).
The average email user will receive 3,900 unwanted messages a day by 2007. (Jupiter Research)
Spam will cost businesses an average of $874 per employee in 2003. (Nucleus Research)
70.7% of Web users say they would not purchase a product advertised in a spam message. (Burst Media)
Self-proclaimed "bulk emailer" Ronnie Scelson admits to sending out more than 2 billion emails a month. (USA Today)
47% of Internet users between the ages of 7 and 18 have received spam with links to X-rated Web sites. (Symantec)
Healthcare-related messages accounted for 26 percent of all spam in July, 2003. (Clearswift)
63 percent of Internet users believe employers have a duty to protect workers from unwanted e-mails. (InsightExpress)
The number of spam messages that use deceptive subject lines doubled in the first half of 2003. (FrontBridge)
At the end of 2004, only 55 percent of all corporate mailboxes will be protected from spam. (Radicati Group)
The typical corporate email user receives an average of 81 email messages a day and sends 29 messages per day. (Radicati Group)
55.1% of all corporate email is spam. (MessageLabs)
Spammers will send more than 3 trillion messages this year. (Brightmail)
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