Some readers on Hackernews rightly pointed to the lack of context in the story about how much it generally costs spammers to wholesale buy or create these accounts themselves.

I'm lacking some current stats on this, but did find some interesting parallels in a 2011 study by UCSD which showed that the prices for Hotmail accounts were WAY cheaper in bulk than Gmail or even Yahoo accounts, primarily because there were fewer speedbumps to opening a new email account with them, so they had more available.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/sec11-final186.pdf

Fast-forward to the botnet powered mass registrations on Mastodon.social and elsewhere last month, and we can see that the vast majority of the email accounts used to register new accounts were hotmail.com. I don't think that's an accident. Spammers go where it's cheapest and easiest. #microsoft #hotmail #spam

Of course, when it comes to the value of a *hacked* inbox (i.e. one that actually was used by a human at some point and not solely created for abuse), the value can be enormous.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/12/the-market-for-stolen-account-credentials/

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/06/the-value-of-a-hacked-email-account/