Akismet caught its 400th spam for me today. Its 400th inane, random comment spam nobody would mistake for a legitimate comment, and one that search engines have ignored for years. Initially, I was baffled as to why spammers continue to send out billions upon billions of junk emails hawking ci@lis and offering stock tips interspersed with bits of Hemingway. Does anyone actually fall for this stuff? I would never click on a link in a spam email, enter my credit card information, and buy some prescription-free drugs from a Russian pharmacy? Would you? I am willing to assert that no reader of this blog has ever bought anything from a spam email. But of course, we know that we cannot extrapolate the experience of this enlightened audience to the majority of Internet users. The sad truth of the matter is that spam works. Spam works a lot.
The author of The Spambook, a detailed how-to for novice spammers brashly asserts “if you send enough emails, you will make money. Period. I can convince 1 person in 40,000 to buy almost any product“. And there’s the truth of it. Somewhere out there, way on the left side of the I.Q. curve there remain the many thousands of people who will buy pharma online, help the Nigerian princes recover their millions and gleefuly type in their login details into phishing site after phishing site. Spam works, and even if a spammer has to send out a million emails to get one $100 purchase, it is worth it. Technology is not the answer- I have witnessed firsthand user upon user reaching into their spam folder and gleefully acting upon dubious stock tips. The answer lies in education- education, education, and more education, shown to every user loading up Windows or Mac OS for the first time. A sort of mandatory primer on the Internet, required viewing for anyone purchasing a new computer. A simple 10 minute educational animation would do so much to reduce the amount of spam and fraud on the Internet, and save our economy untold billions.
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haha, I get the above a lot. Fake trackback links that say my blog is AWESOME. Boost your ego, but I don’t think anyone is stupid enough to click on the links.
lol SPAM !! I think we are getting used to of this thing , now it doesnt seem off when we recieve some spam in the inbox, although we are confident enough to NOT TO CLICK on these links or not to respond to these mails
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