Who Benefits from Spam, Anyway?

Elbowgeek asks: "I've noticed that the vast majority of spam emails I receive are barely literate, to the point that in some cases one can hardly discern the product or service being advertised. Since most people are savvy/jaded enough to detect these entities that are not filtered automatically, just where does the profit motive from these messages come from? Is it simply the theory that if you send enough spam messages you're very likely to hit enough gullible recipients to make an acceptable amount of money? Does anyone have any insight on this dark underbelly of Internet advertising?"

Comments

Which of course brings up the question . . .

[Rachel Lucid]

Is there any point left in spam but to keep spam-blocking companies in business? After all, Internet Security is quite the nice racket...

Re:Weird one word spam lately...

[beadfulthings]

Eeuwh. Believe it or not, they can cause you many Maalox moments under certain circumstances.

Take a close look at these. If (a) you have a website, and (b) they come in pairs, or especially if they come in threes, they can be a signal that somebody is evaluating you for a bit of cross-site scripting--or worse yet, that they have you. They may look as though the sender has forged and garbled your email address--but then again, they may not look like that. Little spates of one-word messages merit a second glance. They're like the odd little sounds you might hear if someone were trying the doorknobs of your house in the middle of the night.