It seems as though the subject of spam has come up a lot lately in various places such as Digg, Slashdot, Yahoo, my own ventures around the Internet and even right here at this blog. I thought I would take a little time to write about this subject to shed some light on the problem for those that maybe don’t know a lot about it.
What is Spam?
Spam is to the Internet what telemarketing is to your telephone. It is a way for people to advertise for very little cost to thousands, and sometimes millions, of people. The idea is that for X number of emails you send out somebody is going to bite. So if you make $10 for every “bite” and you get one “bite” per every thousand emails you send out, if you send out one hundred thousand emails you will make $1,000. How about if you send out a million emails? That’s $10,000. This is a very basic explanation of spam, but it’s to the point and simple.
What really bothers me about this as that someone has to bite. I would say that most of the spam I get via email is about various prescription drugs. This tells me that spamming prescription drugs is a profitable business. This also means that lots of people are receiving these spam emails and purchasing drugs through them, or they think they are and they end up sending off money and getting nothing but that’s a whole other issue. The point that I’m trying to make here is that stupid people who are buying this shit are making this a profitable business and that is why I continue to get spammed.
Stop Spam
There are various types of filters and software that claim to get rid of spam by catching it before it makes it to your inbox, blog, website, or whatever. I have found that for the most part these things do work, but they are not one hundred percent on the mark. For example, I have seen cases where an email that is not spam gets marked as spam, and therefore I never receive it. I also think it’s funny that some anti-spam software is spam itself. I know this sounds crazy but many of the pop up blockers, and spyware scanners that are supposed to protect you are actually nothing more than spyware and spam proliferation devices themselves.
If you ask me the absolute best way to stop spam is to make spamming a non-profitable business. If you get an email telling you about some great deal, chances are it’s probably not. If we quit buying from spammers, we will quit getting spammed. Having said that, do I actually think it’s going to happen? No. I don’t believe for one second that the human race is smart enough to stop buying into bullshit, and that’s the bottom line.
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