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However the spammers get your mailbox address, once one spammer has it, they will send you Spam.

Spammers spam to make money. Spammers make money by using two methodologies.

  1. Selling crappy, fraudulent and sometimes non existent services or products. (e.g. Viagra, pyramid schemes, fake Rolexes, pirated software and movies etc)
  2. ‘Pump and dump schemes’ where the Spammer releases anonymous stock tips for penny stocks that the spammer owns  in the hope that a schmuck acts on the tip that ‘serendipity’ sent him and surges the price.

The theory of Spam is to use Internet email to contact 10 million people at a time so that you can do business with the one-in-10-million schmuck who will actually buy your crappy product.

Without the schmuck there would be no Spam (I have already blogged on this) but out of 10 Million people you are always likely to get one or two.

That Spammers can get this kind of reach shows the absolute genius of the Internet’s designers. The designers of the Internet brilliantly built a system that could connect millions of computers but they spent little time planning for malicious use. If they had it would be unlikely that the Internet would be anywhere as powerful as it is today.

Most of the core Internet protocols that computers use to talk to each other (e.g. HTTP used for web browsing and SMTP used for email) are anonymous by default. Your email server will assume that any email server that connects to it over the Internet is giving its name accurately and that the email is legitimate. The sending email server doesn’t log onto your server in any way and doesn’t have to provide credentials to you. Spammers abuse the trust that is inherent in the Internet to send you their rubbish.

The core Internet protocols are not about to change in a hurry so we need other ways to stop Spam.

There have been a number of legislative attempts but these have been spectacularly unsuccessful. Geography is a problem. Where do you prosecute a US based spammer sending email from a Russian server selling products shipped from China to mailboxes in New Zealand?

Spammers also use Trojan techniques to highjack consumer PCs and get them to send their Spam. If Mr and Mrs Jones have out of date antivirus software their computer could be sending millions of Spam messages on behalf of the Spammer without their knowledge. These people would be caught up in any comprehensive Spam legislation.

Lazy marketers are also a problem for legislators. The email that Paul Richardson from TotalSalesPartners (nobody I know) sent to me yesterday had an opt-out option which was kind of funny as I had never opted-in. It was sent to info@lancom.co.nz and while it was not as vile as some of the other Spam we get it was Spam. These people should know better. These people would be caught up in any comprehensive Spam legislation.