The significant decline of spam
In October Commtouch reported an 18% drop in global spam levels (comparing September and October). This was largely attributed to the closure of Spamit around the end of September. Spamit is the organization allegedly behind a fair percentage of the worlds pharmacy spam.
Context & Ripple Effects
The decline reported here fits an arc the corpus has tracked for years: back in November 2006, research found that just ten spammers were responsible for 80 percent of all spam, which meant the spam economy was always more concentrated than its volume suggested. Commtouch's quarterly reporting — including its Q2 2009 spam trends — has treated spam levels as a supply-side market, where capacity comes and goes with the fortunes of a few large operators.
What changed at the end of September 2010 was the disappearance of one of those large nodes: Spamit, allegedly behind a substantial share of the world's pharmacy spam, closed down. Commtouch measured the immediate result as an 18% month-over-month drop in global spam from September to October — evidence that removing a single major player moves the global number, not just a niche.
First-order effects
- Global spam volumes fall 18% between September and October per Commtouch, with pharmacy spam hit hardest by the loss of its alleged primary affiliate operation.
- Mailbox providers and filter vendors get a measurable reprieve: less junk arriving means lower bandwidth and filtering load per inbox, at least while the gap holds.
Second-order effects
- Other spam operations face a pricing and recruitment opening — displaced pharmacy-spam affiliates need new programs to run their traffic through, testing whether remaining networks absorb the volume or whether the capacity simply exits the market.
- Security vendors gain a proof point for marketing enforcement-adjacent narratives alongside filtering products, since a takedown produced what years of filtering improvements had not: a visible drop in raw volume.
Third-order effects
- If the 2006 concentration finding still holds — a handful of actors driving most output — then anti-spam strategy structurally shifts from purely defensive filtering toward offensive disruption of key infrastructure and operators, where single interventions yield outsized global results.
- Regulators and law enforcement get a template for asymmetric wins: targeting the commercial backbone of spam (affiliate programs and their revenue paths) may prove cheaper per unit of impact than chasing individual senders, though durability remains unproven until the volume data over several quarters is in.
The trend: Because spam production is concentrated among a few large operators, single-point takedowns like Spamit's closure are becoming a measurable lever on global spam volumes alongside traditional filtering.