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Thread: Explain spam to me

  1. #1
    The Queen Zuul's avatar
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    Default Explain spam to me

    While it doesn't take much investment to send out massive amounts of emails, the potential for being fined for sending spam seems like it should be some sort of deterrent for an act which, as near as I can tell, has little benefit to it.

    I can understand the point of message board spam, because that's actually far less about getting the posters on the board to look at the links and far more about hiding the links so that they'll be picked up by search engine spiders and raise your site's rank.

    But email or instant messenger spam seem utterly pointless to me. If some spammer manages to get into my inbox, my response isn't, "Oh boy, a webcam with live nudes!" It's closer to, "Goddamnit. I thought this filter caught all of these." So are there enough people out there who can be swayed by spam that it continues to be lucrative? Do some people lose all sense or reason when they see that they can buy herbal Viagra for CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP?
    So now they are just dirt-covered English people in fur pelts with credit cards.

  2. #2
    Elen síla lumenn' omentielvo What Exit?'s avatar
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    It is really cheap to spam. If they send out 1,000,000 spam mails and get 5 successes it has paid for itself and turned a profit.

  3. #3
    The Queen Zuul's avatar
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    It sounds like 1,000,000 spam emails to five sales might be a low figure.

    So what results did the study bring? They averaged one response for every 12.5 million messages.
    Hopefully with such a meager profit margin we can eventually wipe them out.
    So now they are just dirt-covered English people in fur pelts with credit cards.

  4. #4
    Stegodon
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    Quote Originally posted by Zuul View post
    While it doesn't take much investment to send out massive amounts of emails, the potential for being fined for sending spam seems like it should be some sort of deterrent for an act which, as near as I can tell, has little benefit to it.
    That's why a lot of spammers use botnets these days. Botnets are groups of computers infected with a certain type of virus. Instead of destroying the data on a user's computer, many viruses these days try to be as silent as possible. The people behind the viruses can then send out commands to the group of infected computers, which can include sending out spam or launching Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on Internet servers. This makes tracking the source of spam very difficult. Just as the centralized Napster was easy for the RIAA to shut down, but Gnutella-based P2P apps are all but impossible to shut down (technically speaking), so too are spam botnets hard to track... and when an offending computer is found, it's just a user with an unknowingly infected computer, not the spammer his or herself.

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