Couple of questions about spam

I’ve noticed I always seem to get a batch of spam (not the meat, though it seems appropriate) around lunchtime. It comes from diverse sources and when I trace it, the originators seem to have nothing in common. Why is this? It comes from diverse geographical locations.

Also - why is that the great majority of spam focusses on a handful of products? Almost every message I get concerns porn, viagra, penis enlargement, university degrees, and lately, bird-feeders (?!) I can understand some of the porn stuff - perhaps the spammers are hoping people will be tempted by the anonymity of it - but bird-feeders? I’ve never had spam for, say, furniture.

Do advertisers actually think spam works? I mean does ANYONE here actually read spam or click on any of the links within it? It seems like a waste of time, and I have to wonder why spammers haven’t figured that out by now.

I have read that they only have to have a .04% response rate to make money. It costs almost nothing to mail millions of messages.

Here are a couple of good articles on one notorious spammer:
Spam King lives large off Others’ Email troubles
How to annoy a spammer
If you read the first one, you have to read the second. This jerk gets a taste of his own medicine.

Also this one:
Behind Enemy Lines: A Spammer Gets Hacked
Rodona Garst is one of the biggest spammers out there. She lives about 2 miles from me.

Are you sure the spam is coming from different areas? Spammers take advantage of two holes in the Net email system. (Which were actually good ideas when we could trust people on the Net.) The first is that headers can be forged easily. The second is that spammers use “open relays” to route their email thru (thus disguising the true origin). It takes a really good knowledge of email headers to ascertain the true origin of spam. ISPs try to automate header parsing, but the spammers keep inventing new ways to fool the programs.

Note that spammers are obviously members of a certain ethical class. Such people are drawn to selling products of a certain ethical worthiness. Birdfeeders are obviously of a different class but sometimes dumb but “normal” retailers get suckered into buying spammer services. For a while a few months ago I was getting a lot of “flat hose” adverts. So it goes.