IndianWeb2 wrote an interesting post about how India, according to a recent report, by Secure Computing. I had recently read an interesting post about how the spamming industry works (you heard me, I said spamming industry). Not surprisingly, there are actually small corporates that are responsible for sending out spam mail - some of them send over a billion per day, from servers that they have from all over the world. They charge a nominal fee - something like $30 for 500,000 emails. While I imagine that the response rates are really quite low, but even if 1 in every 10,000 people reply to that email - that’s 50 leads - and depending on the value of what you’re selling / trying to steal, those figures may make more sense than buying Google Adwords!

Curious about the geographic origin of bulk emails I wandered over to Google insights, and ran a search for ‘bulk email’. Here’s what I found:

The list above is based on volume of searches for the keyword ‘bulk email’. I’m guessing if somebody is searching for bulk email services, from a particular location, they’re going to want to use those services.

Its actually quite interesting that this list differs quite significantly from the one by Secure Computing. Sure, it depends on the keyword used, but ‘bulk email’ was the most popular ones amongst the related searches (bulk mail, free bulk mail etc.) Not surprised that Ghana / Nigeria was so high up here - I’m guessing I’m not the only one that used to get those emails about how a Nigerian Price was trying to flee the country and needed your help in return for a million dollars.

Digging a little deeper for India:

It turns out that Chennai’s the ranks number 1 here! So when I did a search for ‘Chennai bulk email’ I found this site at the top of the search results (it is indeed, based in Chennai):

The most hilarious thing of all is the little ’subscribe to newsletter’ form in the bottom left corner - yeah, right, like I’m going to give my email address to a mass emailing service! You’ve got to love their audacity though!

Addition:

Ironically, just five minutes after I put in the ‘!’ I received this email from ‘The National Heritage Lottery’:

The Heritage National Lottery
44BC North Road
East Sussex BN1CC
Central London Uk

Winning Notification:

The United Kingdom Heritage National Lottery wishes to inform you that
the results of the E-mail address ballot lottery National program held
by Great Britain on the 16th of August,2008. Your email account has been
picked as a winner of a lump sum pay out of £,1000,000.00 (One Million
Pounds Sterling). This is from a total cash prize of £8,612,170GBP
shared amongs the (8)lucky winners in this category i.e Match 6 plus
bonus.For more Details, Do contact Mr Brube Wronthwell:

(EMAIL: claimsprocessing_department_unit10@hotmail.co.uk

Tags: Spam, Technology, Technology News

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