How prevalent is spam?
Very. About one-half to three-quarters of the world’s daily total of e-mail is spam, depending upon whom you talk to and when you talk to them. This proportion is even higher in some parts of the world (e.g., in Russia, where one ISP estimated that between 80 and 95 per cent of total mail handled was spam). A few years back, one major cable internet provider in the U.S. estimated that its facilities were being abused to send spam at the rate of over six hundred million per day, thanks to their subscribers’ infected “open proxies” that can send spam outside the supervision of the ISP’s mail system. This large volume of spam becomes even more remarkable when you learn how few people are responsible for it. Spamming is no longer a business for small-time chickenboners; it takes skill and resources not available to the average internet user. The anti-spam group spamhaus.org has for some time maintained that 80% of the world’s spam is sent by fewer than 200 known “spam gangs,” interrelated
