A week or so ago, the government shut down the largest spamming organization in the country. You’d think that would slow down the influx in my mailbox, but it hasn’t. Wishful thinking, I suppose.
Some of the spam I get looks like bounced mail. I thought it was just a clever way of spamming someone, but it turns out it’s a bit more complex than that. Dubbed “backscatter spam,” it is caused when a spammer uses your email address as a spoof in the header of a spam email sent out to millions of people. When one of the email addresses the spammer is sending to bounces back, it goes back to you because your email address was spoofed in the header.
It is estimated that up to 3% of email today is backscatter, although I find that hard to believe. I don’t even get 3% spam mail, much less 3% backscatter. But it does explain the bounced mail messages I see in my box when I know I didn’t email that person. It’s nice to have a decent explanation for the phenomenon.
I wonder, as I always do, why spam works. Are that many people dumb enough to click through a link on a spam email and buy the product being advertised? I’ve never done that and don’t know anyone who has. If people would just not click the links and not spend money at a site they are directed to, spam would have no reason to exist. And how many click-throughs and purchases does it take for a spammer to make any kind of money? It doesn’t seem worth it for a couple hundred bucks, so it must be more lucrative than that. How lucrative, I am not sure.
I would have agreed a few years ago but their is no real factual information on the internet anymore theory and wrong information flood the internet a few years ago you could do research on the internet but now most of your searches return porn and subject materials that are extremely unrelated to the subject most of the information on the subject is sketchy at best. I much prefer a library at least their their is some over site on the information and some of it is more reliable although not all factual and researched by people who are focused on the truth and not just a whim. Their are some reliable sources on the internet but it is easier to find these sources at a library which subscribes to these web biased archives of information than to purchase the subscriptions yourself for basic research.