Spammers really bug the crap out of me. I manage my own spam filters, and naturally I don’t have any interest in Viagra, so one of the words I add to my filters is “Viagra". If you’ve had email for 5 minutes, you already know where this is heading. It’s true that I no longer receive any mail exhorting me to buy “Viagra". In other words, the filters work! Instead, now I am solicited to buy “V1A G’ra” and “vi 4grA” and “V!a6ra", and so many more permutations that the mind reels.
What are they thinking? I mean, when I set up my filter to reject Viagra ads, wasn’t that sufficient to convince someone that I’m, I don’t know, not interested in buying Viagra? Someone obviously thinks that the fact that I’m not interested in Viagra, spelled correctly, clearly implies that I am interested in “V1A G’ra". Some moron, somewhere, must actually imagine that I’m sitting there saying, “Say, that’s not how I usually spell Viagra! That looks interesting! I think I’ll click on that message!”
And of course, it’s not just Viagra. I’ve had my current email address for an Internet Age (since 1992), and it’s been exposed on the web more than once, so it’s had time to get on a lot of lists. Prescription drugs and every variety of the Nigerian scam are big hits on my inbox, along with viruses, worms, and phishers, and I can’t even begin to tell you some of the varieties of stupid, vile and disgusting spam which comes across my email queue. (Hm, maybe I should rephrase that.) I’ve taken to adding even the common mispellings to my filters, but this is a sucker’s game, obviously.
And obviously, the spammers know that I’m not really interested in “v i g a r a". They just don’t care.
The economics of the spam game are rigged in favor of the spammer, and they’re rigged in favor of the spammer doing things which would be irrational in other contexts (say, direct mail advertising). The marginal cost of sending out a spam is essentially zero, so there’s no penalty for sending out millions of messages to addresses which don’t exist, or to people who aren’t apparently interested. And spammers don’t pay for bounced messages, since they forge the return header. So maybe I’ve changed my mind about Viagra since setting up my spam filters, and maybe this message is the one I impulsively click on the exact moment after I’ve changed my mind, so the probability that I’ll return this message isn’t zero, it’s just really, really tiny; and that is enough for a spammer, since sending the message cost him nothing. Therefore, he has a perverse incentive to beat my spam filters by spelling his product wrong, because even though I said I didn’t want it, maybe, maybe … maybe, I do today.
Talk about not taking no for an answer.
