Let's be clear about spam.

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Jun 29, 2004 22:31:22

Spam is your fault. That is, spam isn't going to go away if individuals' behaviors in response to spam don't change. I overheard a conversation tonight that made me laugh out loud. I won't go into the severity of the participants' ignorance, but I'll start by clearing up some misconceptions about spam:

  1. (For my mother) Spam, for the purpose of this discussion, is not the potted meat with which you have some mysterious obsession.
  2. Spam is a solicitation of any kind, resembling junk mail you might find in your mailbox.
  3. Spam is traceable back to 1978 on Arpanet, 1994 on the Internet, and has seen widespread use on the Usenet for at least the past 10 years.
  4. While much of the spam in circulation are scams, there are several 'legitimate' businesses that are using spam as a marketing tool.
  5. Spam poses a significant security risk to all computers connected to the Internet. Both because spammers use unsecured computers as relays for spam, and it is sometimes used as a vector to carry computer viruses and other malicious attacks.
  6. Spam comprises a significant portion of the Internet's traffic. AOL alone claims to be blocking 2-3 billion messages a day.
Spam spreads for one reason, and one reason only: People are stupid. Individuals continue to purchase products and services, fall victim to 'phishing' scams, respond to (or sometimes simply open) messages, or otherwise show the spammer that there is a possibility of future business. Believe it or not, spammers are not there simply to annoy you and destroy your productivity: They have a simple economic incentive to keep spamming.
Take the example of the AOL employee who was recently caught stealing all 93 million of AOL's users' email addresses. He was able to peddle the list to spammers for $50,000. Let's say that for every sale a spammer makes, he takes a $5 profit. That's only 10,000 people he needs to respond. That's roughly one in every 10,000 people that receives the message, or 0.01%. It turns out that a spammer's success rate on a single campaign is closer to 0.02%, making it a wildly profitable business to be in, especially since you can use the list over and over again.
Spam isn't ever going to go away. Whitelists make me miss important messages. Blacklists are a joke. The better the filtration is, the better spammers get at evading it. The only possibility is for you to stop responding.

garth[at]tunnel19[dot]com
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