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Confession For Two: A Spammer Spills it All
defender writes "Rejo Zenger, well known Dutch anti-spam activist, recently had a very frank talk with a (now retired) spammer. He got information as to how and why S. Pammer started, where and why he was kicked out, who helped him get his bulletproof hosting, his open proxy mailings etc. It gives a nice and concise view of what the costs for a smalltime spammer are. About 200 Euros for the hosting and ability to spam at least half a million addresses (in a months time). That's for a turnover of 6 times and a net profit of well over twice those initial spam-related costs. Complete with screenshots, of course."
yOU aRE sHOVED uP yODA'S gREASED aSS! lINUX gOES yOU!
I want to know.
A spammer profits while internet resources are criminally misused, communities are destroyed and individual health and safety (via virii) are compromised.
The costs these fucktards incur upon everyone else leaves us with a wasteland. If it weren't for vigilant individuals spending their free time trying to fight the problem, the internet would probably die
Oh, woe is me.
First of all, until recently no internet resource were being "criminally misused". Spam is fundamentally identical to telemarketing and direct postal mail. You publish a means of contact and people who believe they have something you would be interested in contact you. Yes, spam is more of a problem because bandwidth and computation is much cheaper than telephone lines, postage, printing. So now it's being made criminal, but even within the bounds of current law, you can receive a lot of marketing email. Don't misuse the word criminal, please.
The fact is that direct marketing sells. People buy the products that are advertised. This seems to indicate that they may actually be promoting products that people find of value. Does that make them the scum of the earth? No, it makes them annoying to people who were poorly targetted. Those are not the same thing.
Spam is moderately annoying. It is not destructive. It is not particularly wasteful, except of your time. And it certainly doesn't compromise individual health and safety. Spam is almost always just direct marketing, and is not the same thing as propogating virii or Nigerian scams. Conflating the two (annoying marketing vs. the evil stuff) only makes it harder to efficiently dedicate resources to the ones that really need to be addressed.
But beyond that, legal spam doesn't make the internet a wasteland. It subsidizes it. I know you don't want to believe that, but it's true. When you give your email to a website operator, and that website operator sells it, that money is what keeps your content cheap or free. It's just like television and newspapers.
If you want to avoid spam, do the same thing you'd do with advertising on TV: stop taking advantage of its products. Either buy content at a high enough markup that operators needn't sell your address, or use publically funded content. But don't expect to eradicate internet advertising while still getting everything for free. It just can't work that way..