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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?"
Well you can assume that some of the Spam is static used to detrain spam filters. But for most cases Spammers make money in sending the Spam, Not selling the services that goes with it. So say they charge $10,000 for a Million emails. So unexpecting company or some poor smuck think he is going to get rich quick with this stuff will pay the spamming companies so much to give the link to their website and sell a product. But there is no promise that they will sell the product they only promise to deliver a million emails. So what normally happens the Smuck goes bankrupt and the Spammer gets the money. If the Spammer can get past the Spam filters then they can promise better visibility.
There is basically an endless pot of Smuck who think they can get rich quick by selling sex toys, Investing in stock tips...
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The short answer: yes. Send out a million emails and get a .1% response and it's more than worth it.
who benefits from all the badly formatted spam? Wasn't there a story about this a day or 2 ago: someone suggested that it wa an attempt to train baysean filters to accept spam?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
By doing this
1. Send mass, annoyingly misspelled emails
2. Wait as stupid people wanting (insert lame thing here) open and click on them
3. ??????
4. Profit
Funny createSig(Witty remark, Odd reference)
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It's just like every other business out there. Some people don't know how to run them. Unfortunately, with spam, these idiots are able to make a major anoyance of themselves with their ill-concieved, badly run catastrophies.
Trust me, the illiterate folks really don't make any money. But they're only part of your spam. The one where, you know, you can actually find some information on how to buy a product? They're doing ok.
TW
Apparently a lot of the 'gibberish' spam not trying to sell you anything is just there to try to untrain the spam filters so the next one that does try to sell you something might slip through. Or it negates the spam filters' effectiveness so much that people have to start looking in their spam filters for actual messages.
Personally, I think there's a lot less of a greed factor right now than there is an 'us vs' them' factor. I really think it's just getting to be an elaborate game for these spammers now - all they're trying to do is thwart the filters, and they've forgotten all about trying to dupe people out their money.
Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
There are two layers at work; the spammers and the "vendors" they spam for. The spammers are paid to spam, but they don't really care if the product sells or not. It's just like any advertising--magazines are paid to print your ads, but if they ads don't work, it's not their problem.
If you extrapolate normal advertising out by a few orders of magnitude (dumber, cheaper, wider distribution, etc.) you get spam. If you don't extrapolate out far enough (and find yourself in direct mail or telemarketing), no worries. Just keep going in that general direction a while longer, and eventually you'll come to spam.
--MarkusQ
I've spent an inordinate amount of time fighting spam on my server in the past. My guess is that the completely mussed up ones are a combination of the following:
Of those three, only one is intentional. Seeing some large nefarious purpose may be giving the spammers too much credit.
As a side note, some of my favorites are the pharmaceutical spams that say the names of the drugs, but don't offer any means of purchase let alone contact. I often wonder if some madman at GSK or Pfiser is reminding the world that v1a6r@ can be spelled so many different ways.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
Is there any point left in spam but to keep spam-blocking companies in business? After all, Internet Security is quite the nice racket...
Um.
1. Spam has never been used to advertise respectable products.
2. The motive for virus writing nowadays is profit, same as spam. Viruses let you put up adware and create zombie hordes for spam forwarding or DDoS blackmailing.
3. In the past, the motive for virus writing was not to hurt other people, but simply a kind of power trip or experiment. For proof, look at how very small the proportion of viruses that intentionally delete data is. The psychopathic "hurt as many people as possible" mindset is extremely rare.
I get paid pretty well to deal with this crap and keeping it from getting to our clients. For all the annoyances spammers cause, I'd like to thank them for keeping me employed! And then hit them for even trying to send me spam.
It's a girl!
I think there are lots of different kinds of spam, and therefore lots of different answers to the OP's question. Examples:
-A spam that they want you to click on in order to see porn. If you click on it, it really does lead to porn, and they get ad revenue.
-A spam that's trying to find out whether your address actually receives mail. If you click on the opt-out link, they've verified that the address works. They then add your e-mail to a list that they send to other spammers.
-The Nigerian scam. Yes, people really do fall for this. There was a famous case here in Orange County recently where a rich, elderly doctor blew hundreds of thousands of dollars on it.
For a spammer who owns a botnet, the cost of sending a spam is zero. When your product costs zero to produce, you can come up with a lot of ways to sell it, and still make a profit.
Find free books.
Does a lot of spam come from zombie machines though? Certainly a lot of spam comes from open relays, and a certain amount comes from inept web hosts (although I've leased servers, and most datacenters get very suspicious when your email traffic picks up). But how much spam comes from infected PCs with so many ISPs now blocking outgoing requests to port 25?
I run a small project web hosting company with about 30 customers. We used to offer outgoing SMTP services, and still do (password required), but the majority of our customers are now unable to use it. We now recommend that everyone use their ISP's outgoing mail server. Another issue we ran into was a whole lot of mail gets rejected if reverse DNS entries aren't configured properly, and this would also be a problem for zombie machines. Perhaps I'm thinking of zombie machines as hijacked PCs and the real problem is hijacked servers.
I would assume, and I recognize that I could be completely incorrect, that most spam today comes from mass mailing companies. These companies of course use devious methods to deliver messages, from targeting open relays to abusing web hosts to running servers in "anything goes" data centers.
The reason I don't think that the motivation is the same as virus writers is that almost all spam, aside from phishing attempts and obvious goofs, has a link to an actual website selling something. If I were a virus writing kind of guy and wanted to send out a zillion junk messages, they wouldn't be advertisements for viagra because I'd want some kind of recognition.
If I had to bet, my money would be on the low percentage success rate. That is, it's cheap to send a million emails, and if only a tiny percent of those messages result in a sale, it's probably worthwhile financially. Spam *must* be a money game. It just doesn't make sense to me otherwise. Consider how the web is also being overrun by "spammers": bogus block sites, bogus search sites, bogus link sites, all designed to make money off a tiny little click through rate.
Wouldn't it be nice if some elite group of movie-style good guy hackers got together to knock the shit out of spammers? I'm not sure if there's any other solution but to knock them out. Legislation is minimal help, but only in certain countries. Anti-spam software is a band-aid and doesn't lessen much the financial burden of spam. Unless everybody in the world all at once decides to switch email protocols, I don't know if this will ever stop. It's obscene.
I don't really even use personal email anymore. I don't care to keep on top of my filters so I just don't bother. I remember a time when I checked my email multiple times every hour. Now I check it once a week to see if something came in from an address that I've got a routing rule for. "Downloading 393 messages....one of which is legit." Fun.
That's not true. Spammers are paid a percentage or flat fee based on what is sold with their referrer ID. Nobody is paid just to spam. Google is the last major advertising company/industry on the web that actually pays people just to advertise, with no results. Porn and spam both figured out that per impression or per click or per email doesn't work, and there haven't been any of those programs available in either industry for at least the past 6 years (yes, they figured this out while all of the "straight" people were jerking themselves off during the dot-com bust).
My regular email address gets them from time to time but its my Final Fantasy XI PlayOnline email address that gets them the most.
They are emails with gibberish for subject lines and gibberish for contents. They are sentences which make no sense what so ever, random words put together that have little meaning at all. There's no ad, no link, and the addresses they are sent from are bogus (I know, I tried finding them). A few of these emails have originating address of @ds1.yahoo.com or @server1.paypal.com or @ddl.amazon.com and so on and so forth. The actual address itself is made up of random letters and numbers.
My theory, like those suggested aboove, is that these emails are sent by "Botnets" to random email addresses in order to see which ones don't bounce. This can be in preparation for sending ad-like spam or a prelude to a virus infestation. Or, like someone else suggested it could be a form of coded communication which is widely broadcasted in order to prevent the authorities from find out its true intended destination.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
"Yes, Jimmy, people really do buy spam advertised products"
Fine. Some idiots out there buy vi@gr@ from spam. But I'd be willing to be that damn close to 0% of people WHO ACTIVELY FILTER SPAM buy stuff from spam.
So, who do they try so hard to defeat spam blockers?? Think about it- they are working so very hard in order to make their message reach the very people who specifically try to block it.
Why?
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.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
You're probably right about zero response from those who actively filter spam. But many people have spam filtered by their ISP or webmail service, and aren't even really aware of it. I think they are the main targets of spam filter evasion.
Do you feel there is any connection between Islamic radicals, terrorism and Microsoft? I suppose you would argue that it's not about religion, but more about the attempt to suppress open source?
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
"So Microsoft intentionally ships crappy software so that spammers will disrupt communication among open source programmers? Did I get that right?"
No, silly! Microsoft intentionally ships crappy software so that spammers will disrupt communication among the Bilderbergers, The Freemasons, The Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations and then Microsoft sets up open source programmers as the bad guys creating the spam so that the Illuminati will hire the Knights Templar to kill off all the open source programmers.
It's brilliant. Really.
I'm beginning to think they must be paying Google to never tag their crap as spam.
1) Offer free email with gobs of space to instantly become a major player in that area.
2) Punch blatantly obvious holes in the spam filters for your biggest-budget customers.
3) When people complain, simply remind them that it's still in beta.
4) Profit!
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
"would assume, and I recognize that I could be completely incorrect, that most spam today comes from mass mailing companies. These companies of course use devious methods to deliver messages, from targeting open relays to abusing web hosts to running servers in "anything goes" data centers."
Your are correct that you are incorrect. Simply examine the IP addresses that spam comes from: Comcast, RoadRunner, SBCglobal, Adelphia, ATT, kingwoodcable.com, cebridge.net, Verizon, calpop.com, atmlinkinc.com, Charter, uci.net, ctccom.net, Earthlink, Qwest, suddenlink.net, Sprint, knology.net, insightcom.com, mdm.net, zoominternet.net, mnsi.net, Netzero.
Those are just a few of the sources of spam that was in my spam folder this morning. It does not include andy of the 300 or so that were trapped at the server by an IP filter that blackholes anything sent from a foreign (non-U.S.) IP address.
Why so many different sources and why from consumer IP addresses if these are not zombied machines?
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Interesting article in august's wired magazine: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/spamking. html [wired.com]
It talks about the life and death of a "russian spam king", discussing the infamy as well as the money that spam brought him.