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

Microsoft has and would benefit from spam.

[twitter]

I imagine a lot of it is a denial of service attack. Microsoft is not alone in this. A lot of spam is pure malice. It does not have contact information for a sale or even build brand awareness. Microsoft understands that free software depends on communications between programmers and users and they seek to disrupt it.

Microsoft is unique in wanting to limit network services ISP's have to offer. By creating a problem, such as 80% of the world's spam coming from their broken operating system at the end of cable modems, they gain power as a provider of policy and solutions that cover the majority of the world's computers. Such policies include forced patching which can push new EULAs, and network restrictions that nullify many free software networking advantages. My ISP forces everyone to use their SMTP server with it's arbitrary limits and they told me that M$ and AOL forced them to do it. They also limit upload speed to little better than I could get from DSL. Other infamous suggestions are charging a fee for all email and limiting online advertising to a few "trusted" companies such as themselves. From the problem they create, they seek to gain further advantage and power.

Free software and free networks threaten Microsoft. Their business model depends on selling people second rate software to perform each and every task. They gain adherents by spiffs and arbitrary grants of privilege in an asymmetric computing world. Free software does better than theirs does and makes not grade user status or create arbitrary divisions between "servers" and "work stations" as the eight flavors of Vista do. Why fork over cash to be treated like a serf when you could have all the king's software? Because M$ aims to destroy all simple networking and data exchange protocols, as outlined in their 1998 Halloween Documents. They want to make it as expensive and difficult as possible to leave them. If they don't, people will flock to the vast savings free software has to offer. Free networks and protocols give people the freedom to move.