From: TechRadar.com —

A new, rather unconventional, study by computer scientists at University of California (UC) Berkeley and San Diego has revealed some interesting facts about e-mail spam.

If you think you get a lot of spams, you’re right. And there’s a good reason. The UC researchers found that only about one in 12.5 million spam e-mails evokes a response from recipients — so spammers have to pump put gazillions of spams to make any serious money.

As TechRadar.com’s Adam Hartley reports, “The study … infiltrated the Storm network, which uses hijacked home PCs to relay much of the junk email you spend your days wading through.”

The study revealed that the Storm network had more than 1 million home and office computers under its control at one point, though that number is dropping as individual and corporate computer users become more security-smart.

The UC study involved over 75,000 Storm network-controlled computers and sent more than 350 million fake spams over 26 days, advertising a fake Internet pharmacy and a fake herbal male enhancement preparation. After all that, only 28 recipients attempted to buy the product.

Nevertheless, researchers calculated that a spam network the size of Storm could net operators as much as (US)$7,000 per day, or more than (US)$3.5 million per year.