The lack of a citation in the article bothered me (just mentions "[a] new report by researchers at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and the Inte

The lack of a citation in the article bothered me (just mentions "[a] new report by researchers at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) and the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley"). So I searched for the "magic" 347,590,389 number. It seems to be this Oct. 2008 paper by Kanich et al.: http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ckanich/papers/spamalytics.pdf http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ckanich/papers/spamalytics.pdf I also found a good summary (mentioning BBC reports ...) here: http://blog.mailchannels.com/2008/11/is-spamming-more-profitable-than-anti.html http://blog.mailchannels.com/2008/11/is-spamming-more-profit... Amusingly, this submission's linked article, datelined (2009) July 15, is from a site with a "realtime IT news" banner ...