Every so often I have a quick trawl through my spam folder to make sure nothing has been tagged as spam that I should have received. As I do so I am filled with incredulity - firstly at the shear incompetence of the spammers: emails addressed to $RECPIENT and $NAME, the endless duplicates - if I got just one spam saying "Bob:Merry Christmas" then I might possibly open it out of curiosity, but the fact I got 300 means I know it is spam without even looking. And then I start to think of who all this noise is aimed at - I can only assume that it is the desperately stupid. Those who are prepared to risk their money for items with little chance of working with retailers who are the most dubious on the internet. Those who will buy any unlikely claim of riches, increased sexual prowess or miracles.
This great noise of stupid people selling things to other stupid people fills the internet night and day all year long. Every email box is being battered with it. Hundreds of thousands of computers battle endlessly to identify this material and file it in spam or junk folders so we might not have to waste our time deleting it. And yet there must be people out there making lots of money from this or it wouldn't be happening. One of the most depressing aspects of humanity writ large.
Posted by Mark at January 2, 2007 12:44 PM