A new study from a team of researchers at the University of California in Berkeley revealed that the response rate of spam emails is 1 in 12,500,000.

The researchers manage to get into the Storm network, a network which hijacks home PCs to send out billions of spam emails.

The Storm network had over 1,000,000 million machines in its network.

The team use ‘proxy bots’ to take control of 75,869 of the machines to run their own spam campaign.

The researchers had two typical spam offers – one for a fake pharmaceuticals site and the other for a libido boosting herbal remedy.

According to the results, “After 26 days, and almost 350 million email messages, only 28 sales resulted.”

The researchers estimate that based on this conversion ratio and the size of the network, the people who run Storm are making $7,000 per day, or $3.5 million per year.

As long as the spammers continue to make money by sending you junk mail, you can expect the flow to continue!

Are you surprised by the results? What steps have you taken to prevent spam buildup?