Anticlue

Spam exists for only one reason - it is profitable. Hard to imagine, but the continued proliferation of spam is an existance proof that somewhere, there are a bunch of doofs who actually click on spam and buy stuff. The flip-side of this is that there is really only one way to end spam, and that is to make it unprofitable. If everyone who is sick of spam would attack just one message a day, tying up their salespeople on the phone, ordering as much free literature as possible, giving contact phone numbers that ring forever without answer so the eager spammers' sales people must keep trying, if everyone did that to just one spam sponsor a day, they'd soon see that spam costs them waaay more than traditional advertising media, and spam would soon dry up.

True about the "it's still profitable" angle, but there are additional ways some realize profit here, beyond actual purchases:

-- Some abuse the mails for the clickthrough payments... they get paid by a clueless vendor to draw traffic to the site, so just clicking a link provides the profit motive for the person who sent it. (This seems to be the big driver for "nude cheerleader" mail.)

-- There's the Ponzi scheme aspect of selling mailing lists... a small GIF in an email can ping the server if opened in an HTML-rendering emailer, even if this is done in some mailers' "Preview Pane" rather than a direct click. These "live" addresses are worth more when selling a list.

-- Some offers are designed more to gain a legit credit card transaction than to actually sell the item in the ad....

-- Some email is sent out to take advantage of vulnerable Windows systems, and access to such zombie botnets can then be sold to others for varied evil purposes.

I have no idea how many people actually buy stuff from emails, but this isn't the only reason that some find it profitable to click that little "Send" button...!

jd/mm

A word of warning for folks: I knew the challenges that John (jd) mentions above and would turn off the preview pane and diligently avoided opening suspicious email. Then I got a phone with a mail client on it. Sadly, with that particular client (Eudora 2.1 for Palm), there's not only no way to preview a bit of the message before opening it, but far worse, you can't even delete a message without opening it. I gave up trying to work-around the problem and just started opening the notes to delete them, and ever since my spam volume has gone up tremendously. Forewarned is forearmed.

While we're discussing spam, I just noticed something that has long perturbed me and I'm wondering if it's somehow related to Spam. I'm using Outlook 2002 (no snide remarks about Windows or OL, please).

Every once in a while, when I'm sending mail (using Tools>Send/Receive>Send All), it reports sending more messages than I have in the Outbox. For instance, there may only be 2 or 3 notes to be sent, but it reports sending perhaps 10.

How in the world could it send more than are in the Outbox? The only clue I can offer is that this happened (this time) after downloading a 100+ mails from a particular pop account. Most of it is indeed usually spam.

Again, let's not argue about the merits of using Outlook. It otherwise offers many useful benefits. I really do think in this case it's doing something that it's being told to do. I'm of course not reading the emails, but I do have a spam client tool (SpamNet) that analyzes the email to decide whether to mark it as spam. Still, even if doing that caused some sort of outgoing mail, why wouldn't it show in the Outbox? Any thoughts? (There was nothing related to this at the SpamNet site, nor any obvious results from a Google search.)

Just throwing this out in case anyone here may have an idea. Apologies for turning Elyse's post into a tech support request. Hopefully my previous comment's help to others may make up for it. :-)