Dealing with Spam

Spam email is annoying, and for the most part I do my best to ignore it, just delete it out of hand without getting upset. It's very easy to get worked up, to want some kind of cyber-revenge on the perpetrators, those evil spamsters who make it their business to clog up everyone's inbox with utter crap.

But requesting to be removed from the mailing list does no good. Most replies will bounce back, because the return address is bogus. The spamsters just want you to click their links and buy something, and are not in the slightest bit interested in discussing such things as unsubscribing from the mailing list. Think about it: The most wide-spread spam (for viagra, cialis, even computer software) comes from professional spammers, not lovely caring folks with your interests in mind. I did some digging on one particular spammer and found a whole article about a guy residing in Russia who is paid to send millions of emails all over the world in the hope that a tiny percentage of the recipients will be stupid enough to not only click on the links in the email, but actually buy something!

That's the sad truth: Spam of this nature only exists because of a very small minority of idiots who think, "Oh, a spam email about viagra. Actually, I could do with some of that. I might as well click this link and buy some; saves me searching on the internet." I can think of a lot of words for these types of people, but they're not fit for this page. If a million spam emails are sent and only 1% of recipients respond and buy something, well, that's 10,000 buyers. Cut that down to just a 1,000 buyers (0.1%), or even 100 buyers (0.01%), and these spammers are still making a huge profit for doing nothing more than pressing "send."

Because of spam filters in mail boxes these days, spammers have to work around a number of preset "rules." In other words, "viagra" is a red flag, so spammers write "v1agra" (with a 1 instead of an i) and so on. But the text becomes more and more obscure as spam filters catch on to these tricks:

Hey whats up,
Why R3ent when y0u can Bu,uy?=20
We'll provide you with best service.
$350k for 360 pm, v r Justa Giving away

COPY the Address below and paste in your BROaWSER:
Cahokia.lowestpay.net

Filters even look at the combination of words in emails. If a message has text that doesn't seem to contain known spam keywords, well, then it might get through. So spammers inject some random junk like this:

just talking about heaven..
After she'd done her ledger she would clamber into her hammock and read a book for a couple of hours..
distress merchandising," said Sears..
One picture puzzle piece.
that outpaced inflation for the 24 months ended June 30, 2005,.

See you later,
Jewel Templeton=20

*Scratches head* So okay, this made it to my inbox. But how do these spammers make money? Maybe they don't. Maybe they just want to clog up my inbox. The following example tries to lure sad lonely men into emailing a reply, presumably so the spammer can grab your email address and add it to their list of "hopeless sad idiots are who are likely to buy something from a spam email"...

Dear friend,
I found your picture on one of the websites, can we talk to
each other? I might be coming to your place in few weeks.
This would be a great opportunity to meet each other.
Btw, I am a woman. I am 25.
Drop me a line at mqlnh@uwriteme.info

I have a theory to stop spam mail for good. All ISPs (Internet Server Providers) should allow a maximum of, say, 100 emails a month per account to be sent from their SMTP (outgoing mail server). This means that Joe Bloggs can send up to 100 emails for free. Businesses can send more, say 500 a month. After the maximum is reached, every email beyond that costs 2 cents each. Think about it: A professional spammer sending a million emails would have to pay about $20,000. I doubt they'd make that much profit in sales, so the viagra spam business would flop immediately (pun intended). Of course, every ISP in the world would have to comply with the rule, or else spammers would flock to those without a cap on outgoing mail (and those ISPs would then have a deluge of unexpected business, a good reason not to comply).

I'm of the opinion that you can't beat spam, and there's no point in getting angry about it anymore. Some supposedly reputable companies will send you a newsletter on the basis that you "opted in" (ie, supplied your email address somewhere). Rubbish. They bought a mailing list, that's all. They claim they've done nothing wrong, that they bought the mailing list in good faith, but are they honestly going to question where that mailing list came from? It's no different to Semi-Honest Business Man buying suspicious electronic goods from Slightly Dodgy Bloke, no questions asked.