Briefs

Spammers are turning a profit despite only getting one response for every 12.5m e-mails they send, finds a study.

By hijacking a working spam network, US researchers have uncovered some of the economics of being a junk mailer.

The analysis suggests that such a tiny response rate means a big spam operation can turn over millions of pounds in profit every year. It also suggests that spammers may be susceptible to attacks that make it more costly to send junk mail.

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"After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted," wrote the researchers. The response rate for this campaign was less than 0.00001%. This is far below the average of 2.15% reported by legitimate direct mail organisations.

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