Why Do We Still Get Spam
How many email accounts do you have? Me, I have 6 different email addresses. 5 are personal email accounts and one is a work account. Of those 5, I have one that is used for business, one for selling on a swap list, one for Applematters, one for a family business and one last one for everything else. Sadly “everything else” tends to include spam. A lot of spam. Just for fun I figured out what my spam intake looks like. In a 4 day period I received 149 spam messages. Thats an average of 37.25 useless email messages per day. Everyday. Oh, did I mention that I have very detailed spam blockers in place? I shudder to think how bad it could be. Anyway it’s rather interesting to see how my spam breaks down. These are the main categories:
| Type of SPAM | Number of Messages | Percentage | |||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
As you can see most of my spam attempts to entice me with the pleasures of seeing either mature women ,or virgin nymphomaniacs, have sex. Though coming in a strong third are those emails that attempt to give me things for free. In just a four day period I managed to almost get a laptop, desktop, four cell phones, insurance and some “male enhancement” pills for nothing! All I had to do was click on the link. . .
And then rounding out or selections are the phishing schemes designed to pry my ebay/paypal password from me, low intrest loans, credit card offers and some odds and ends like a earning a college degree while from home. Ha, in the process of writing this I have already gotten two more messages trying to help me become debt free!
The Point Of This Message
Here it comes, the entire point of my rant: “Why is there still spam?” Now, I am not asking why the government doesn’t do something about spam or why don’t the ISP’s block it more. No, I am asking the spammers, why do you do it? The phishers I can at least understand, they are crooks who are trying to swindle you. Ok, I hate that but at least I understand. But you spammers, why do you do it? I am one of the millions of people who not only hate you but refuse to buy anything from you. So, how do you stay in business? Because I know of NO ONE who has ever bought anything from a piece of spam. So please tell me, how do you afford the bandwidth and the server space and everything else that is required when setting up a large scale spamming operation? Is there really that much profit in it? please tell me because I have to know, who is buying this stuff? Are there really that many idiots out there?
I suppose there are. What a shame.
So, all of you loyal readers, how much spam do you get, on average, per day? And have you increased the size of your manhood while remaining debt free so you can enjoy mature virgins having sex with a pre-approved loan?
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With my .mac account? Zero.
With my second account? I started getting about four a day after I used that address to register with MacCentral.
All together, I get about a dozen pieces of junk mail in the inbox of my email client from the two accounts in it.
The subjects of these missives is about the same as yours.
Everyday a newbie enters cyberspace. These folks don’t know spam from ham and click on thru. Some are fools enough to buy something. It only takes a few sales out of thousands of emails to keep companies hiring spammers, from what I’ve read. So unless kids learn about the dangers and pitfalls of the internet in school and wise up, spam will always be profitable. Sigh.
No, I am asking the spammers, why do you do it?
Believe it or not, they make money. And lots of it. The spammer who was most recently arrested made between $400K and $700K a month…by himself! Someone out there is paying for this garbage. And as long as they do, these guys will keep doing this.
For years I have had my e-mail addresseses published prominently on my web sites. In the past two weeks I have gotten an average of 320 spams per day. Fortunately the number of spams that make it to my inbox approaches zero because I run my own mail server and use an open source challenge-response system called TMDA. I strongly recommend it. Write to me at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) (See, I don’t even mind putting my unprotected e-mail address on a public forum!) to see the sort of challenge spammers get back. Of course, 99.9% of them never see it because they use fake From addressess.
Oh, and “[email protected]” is already on my whitelist, so if the moderator writes to me from one of those addresses, they won’t get back a challenge.
What’s getting more insidious to me is the proliferation of comment and ping-spamming. I have a blog and it’s almost a part-time job to deal with these things. I shut one blog down because of it. It really makes you want to hunt them down and physically hurt them.
Twice a year I go through my email for a week and utilize every unsubscribe link I find.
I get down to about three spam emails daily and it has stopped getting out of hand. With so much less spam I also am able to flip through my spam folder to check for anything marked as spam that isn’t. I was stunned by the amount of ‘real mail’ my spam filters captured.