So an email arrives in my in box. It is obviously Spam. The subject line is incoherent gibberish. I naturally delete it (and legions of bit-diarrhea just like it). But this got me to thinking, how on earth is this worth the spammer’s time? I assume that these incoherent leet-speak like subject line have to do with defeating filtering tech, but then who but a spastic microcephalic simpleton would open one? Do people want to get ripped off? Is there anyone still out there that can’t see that this is costing our economy vast amounts of money? Are there really people out there that are that abysmally witless, and if so how is it that they are able to operate a computer?
Perhaps what we need to do is to have a public education campaign similar to the war on drugs or those other public service announcements. We could send speakers to schools to catch kids early, and all new computers could have a screen that comes up the very first time the user powers up with an article about why Spam is bad, and how responding to it is costing the economy billions (followed by a quiz that you have to pass in order to boot up and then use the computer). That could be phase one.
Phase two would involve making it illegal to respond to Spam. The punishment would be something similar to what Johns frequenting prostitutes receive. After several years, if that fails to help, we make responding to Spam a federal crime with a minimum of a 5 year sentence, followed by year of probation in which you are not allowed to use a computer and are forced to attend weekly classes (we will call this reeducation).
Phase three: the death penalty.
All of that being said, any actual spammers that we catch should simply be shot on sight.
Maybe Dopers who are more techno-savvy than me can explain it better, but I understand that the spam that just has gibberish in the subject line, and sometimes in the body of the e-mail, is designed solely so that unwary users will say, “Whaaa? What’s this?” and open it. Then the spammer can say to the peddler of body-part expansion formulas, “Look, 20% of people we hit looked at your message!”
Me, I’m relatively soft on crime. I believe spammers should be baked, not fried.
Spam is cheap. How much do you think it costs to send ten thousand junk emails? How many positive responses would recoup costs? Even if nobody wants to buy, you can sell the “live” addresses to someone else.
Gibberish is designed to fool spam filters. Most use Bayesian filtering; more or less, they look at the content and decide whether the words used are indicative of spam. Gibberish, or random irrelevant “sensible” words, may confuse filters into thinking it’s a legitimate email.
I just don’t see the point of trying to trick people in to opening an ad. If I would delete your email on sight knowing that you wanted to seel me a penis-enlargement product, why would I purchase that product from you after you have blatantly decieved me and wasted my time? Especially when I have offers from 12 other people selling the same thing, and being up-front about it!
I may not like non-deceptive spam, but at least I understand why it exists. The tricky shit I just plain don’t understand.
As I understand it, email programs like outlook can report back to the sender when an email is opened. This is how they can tell if a message has reached a live account (and why I leave my preview pane off). So, they then sell the address. It may be that the gibberish spams are more for email harvesting to sell to companies capable of using the English language.
The spam does not need to generate sales to make the spammer money. They’ve already received the cash from the maker of the penis-enlargement pills. All they’ve had to do is persuade that poor sucker that there’s a market out there just waiting to be tapped. And that’s surely the hardest part of a spammer’s job.
I know a couple of guys who are spammers (I do not have ANYTHING to do with it and do not condone it). One of them explained that they will send out 10 to 20 million e-spams a day, usually touting everything from home refinancing to Viagra to gambling to car insurance. On a bad day they get maybe 20 takers and on a good one maybe 150.
They just generate the lead and some other company fulfills the order. They typically get 30% to 40% of the drug products value in commsisions, a set dollar amount with services ($50 for each mortgage ap.) They have about 50 cheap PC’s to manage the e-mail, database and web sites. After you account for their time, connection costs and the equipment costs, the cost for sending out spam is virtually zero. On a bad month they generate $20,000 and a good one they bring in close to $50,000.
That’s a large economic incentive for them to keep spamming. Why anyone would buy financial or drug products from an anynomous e-mail is beyond me.
Because a tiny minority of recipients of the spam are complete morons. Worse; they are complete morons with money. It is only a matter of time before they are parted.
litost, “Spam” (the Hormel product) is a contraction of “Spiced Ham”, which is a generous way of describing the mechanically separated and formed pig meat that is Spam. It’s “spiced” with salt, sugar, and nitrates. Mmmmm.
Internet “Spam” first referred to off-topic Usenet postings, and later more generally to e-mail and web forum postings. It’s a reference to a Monty Python sketch, in which a chorus of vikings keeps interrupting the dialogue with “Spam, spam spam spam-- Spam, spam spam spam-- Lovely spam, wonderful spam!” The analogy stuck, partly because the Vikings are always interrupting, partly because Spam is established as something that’s well-nigh unavoidable, and partly because, waaay back then, there was a much higher nerd-to-not ratio on the internet, and we all had most of the Python repertoire memorized.
World Eater– Yup. (Insert appropriate H.L. Mencken quote here.)
oh, OK. Is there some reason why spam was the meat of choice for that sketch? I mean, why spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam spam? Didn’t Andy Warhol paint spam cans as well?
Spam is the ultimate Uncultured Pop Culture reference. It is barely food, it resembles something you’d feed to convicts, sailors, or other less-than-savory types, and it’s sold with absolutely crappy marketing that reminds people of just how hollow the whole Universe really is.
Warhol was known for painting Campbell’s soup cans. And Marilyn Monroe, who was herself just as commoditized as the soup. That, and he was a generally odd man.
