Take a look at the title of this post. (The first post of 2006.)
This title, while perhaps it is unique, is gibberish - correct?
What this title does is trick my email filters. The filters at the server of my isp and the "learning" ones in Thunderbird too. And there seems to be no way to stop it, at least so far.
For those of you in a cave or those who have not had the pleasure to be bombed by this type of email yet, you are very lucky.
The question I have is this: Why do spammers (The scum they are) keep sending these types of messages? This question is somewhat rhetorical and the answer is: People must be buying stuff from the spammers.
Most of the emails that I have bothered to preview are for drugs like cialis, ambien, etc. or to refinance your mortgage. All I can say to anyone who would utilize such a company that would stoop to this type of spamming to obtain a mortgage are sleeping with the enemy and my hope is that the whole deal is screwed up from the beginning.
The time wasted on spam by me and by millions of others is enormous and costs us billions of dollars per year in lost productivity and spam filters. The company I work for employs an outside email service and the cost is very high for our size organization - but for about 10-20% of the staff, being bombarded by 250-300 junk emails a day was equally costly in lost productivity. Now with the new way of sending jibberish as the subject - somehow the spammers have gotten their messages through the best filters. Their tricks of not spelling out the keywords that spam filters look for - like Mor-Tgage - or a drug name spelled as C1al1s - is readable and decipherable by us lowly humans, but apparently even the smart spam filters that use bayesian and other methods cannot handle this scrambled mess of words to filter them out.
So - any of you who actually buy the stuff you receive from unsolicited spam of any kind - shame on you. It will stop if you stop buying into it or if a more severe method like CHARGING FOR EMAIL were to be implemented. If the spammers had to pay even five cents for each email, it would stop immediately.
To charge for email would be rough, but perhaps there could be some sort of way to make internal domain email free or somehow authenticate the email so your friends and known senders would not incur a fee. A million times .05 is $50,000 - do you think that spammers would spend $50,000 on that advertising if it cost that amount? I am certain it would become a mathmatical business decision - like junk snail mail is now - the 1-3% return rate on bulk mail pays for the advertising costs - so if they were to get say 25,000 orders from that million (2.5%), and each order amounted to $10 - then perhaps the cost would be warranted.
The problem is right now, the cost to send junk mail is extremely low - and it is almost entirely borne by the recipients. I am certain that if I wanted to engage in spam that my costs would not be that high - a software program, an ISP and an email list is all you need.
All you buyers out there - just say no. Don't buy drugs or mortgages or anything that way - that will send them packing.
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