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When Jaynes’ operation was raided, investigators found that
house from which he ran his operation was wired with 16 T-1 lines (a large office building can get by on a single T-1 line for all its users). Investigators also entered into evidence to-do lists handwritten by Jaynes. Take a look at Jeremy Jayne's meticulously detailed lists at:
* www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes1.JPG * www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes2.JPG * www.ciphertrust.com/images/jaynes_notes3.JPG
Good Work if You Can Get (Away With) It The economics of spamming makes Jaynes’ decision to build a career of it understandable, though not noble. Spammers work on law of averages, which would seem like an odd strategy considering that average response rate for a spam message is just one-tenth of one percent. However, once you do math even this miniscule response rate can make one very wealthy very quickly. If a spammer sends one million messages pushing a product width a $40 profit, a response rate of 0.1 percent works out to 1000 customers, or $40,000 per million messages sent. Since each message costs only fractions of a penny to send, and Jaynes was sending literally billions of messages a year, it’s easy to see how he pulled in $400,000 to $750,000 a month, while spending perhaps $50,000 on bandwidth and other overhead.
The fact that spamming can be such a profitable undertaking means that profession is not likely to go anywhere in near future. Spammers have financial motivation to come up with innovative ways to avoid detection, and they have begun to join forces. While landmark decision handed down in Jaynes trial may serve as a deterrent to some would-be spammers, it is unlikely that threat of prosecution will keep future spammers from refining their trade. For now and foreseeable future, answer still lies in technology, not law enforcement.
Dr. Paul Judge is Chief Technology Officer at CipherTrust, the industry's largest provider of enterprise email security. The company’s flagship product, IronMail provides a best of breed enterprise anti spam solution designed to stop spam, phishing attacks and other email-based threats. Learn more by visiting www.ciphertrust.com today.
