What is Spam Mail?
Spam, also known as unsolicited commercial email (UCE) and bulk mail, is email that is sent to multiple users for the purpose of promoting a business or idea. (See also: Spam: The Real Thing )
By some estimates, currently 15 percent of all Internet email is spam. Email address lists can readily be bought for as little as $50.00 for 50,000 to 100,000 "verified" addresses, including the service of sending the spam.
Of course, one person's "spam" may be another person's "business opportunity" (or the valued chance to "earn a college degree in just two weeks!! ") Broadly speaking, however, "spam" is used to describe the unwanted and unsolicited commercial email messages promoting tacky Internet sites, products of dubious quality, and get-rich-quick schemes.
The messages are bulk-mailed to hundreds of thousands of people at a time, with the cost of delivery paid largely by the recipients through the uninvited use their SMTP servers, client computers, and, in some cases, a delivery fee charged by the ISP.
The following is a price list for one bulk emailing service that was sent out, not surprisingly, via bulk mail:
Emails Cost
100,000 –-- $200
200,000 –-- $345
400,000 –-- $875
600,000 --- $1,100
800,000 --- $1,300
1,000,000 - $1,400
2,000,000 - $2,200
Another company boasts of the following, rather impressive, performance rates:
· Throughput Capacity: 675 Emails per second on burst
· 225 Emails of sustained throughput per second on average, allows us to deliver at the rate of 19-22 million Emails per day with all three servers
· We can successfully distribute a List of 100,000 in under 1 hour
· (40) dedicated, high performance Unix servers
· (10) T1's (1.544Mbps) of feed
The problem of unsolicited email is not likely to go away soon.
See also:
Example Unsolicited Email
Why is Spam Mail Bad?
Exploiting Bulk Emailer Flaws