I work for a sizable hosting firm (over 10k clients). Our entry level plans will set you back about 50 euro/yr. If you want some kind of yearlong data guarantee, add another 50 quid there to pay for the storage. Not to mention the writing of, or modification of the system that will keep these for you.

That 50 euro buys you 10GB of storage ; that's a lot of storage that these people seem to want providers to pony up for free. And the bandwidth to download the data from the held backup.

There is no free lunch in this game; the margains are small enough to begin with.

I dnrta ; but I'd imagine that's down to the filtering of mail..

The first x% make it through the filters; then they start getting flagged - be it by reports from the recipients (think AOL Scomp, etc), bouncebacks or by bayesian filters, etc - the spamtype is noted and starts getting blocked.

If my assumptions are correct; a bright spammer would run a mix on his list so they're not in alphabetical order.

The logic being - that those who receive lots of spam (the A's, B's, C's etc) have already started to take measures to block spam or have simply become desensitised to it. Mix it up and those in the M's, Q's, S's, etc start getting spam that previously never made it to their inbox.