RE: [Declude.JunkMail] Are spammers idiots??

[Tony Gray - Network Administrator]

One word:  MONEY.   For every 1000 or so mailboxes they tar up, one poor unsuspecting sap sends them money for whatever they're peddling.  If you could, essentially for free, blast out 100,000,000 emails knowing that 0.1% of them would send you $10 bucks - do the math... I think that's $100k - not too shaby of an investment for some cheap software, a cable modem subscription, and maybe a $300 "everyone in the US's email" cd.    Until we can attack the root of the problem - the fact that it is VERY lucrative to SPAM, it will not go away (and as ISP's we will continue to pay to give these guys a network to make money on).    Legislation isn't going to get very far - "if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns".  I fear that this is going to continue to be a technical battlefield, and is only going to get worse before it gets better.      Thank god we have guys like Len and Scott on our side to help fight the good fight.  ;-) - Tony -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Glenn \ WCNet Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2002 3:39 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Declude.JunkMail] Are spammers idiots?? I've been clearing some mail accounts that customers have abandoned, haven't checked their mail for a couple months or longer.  It's not unusual to find 4000 messages or more, 20 MB or more, ALL of it spam.  No one on a dial-up connection is going to wait for all that mail to download, and nobody using WebMail has the patience to wade through all that debris.   My point being that spammers can easily overload a mail server, sap up all the drive space if some kind of spam control isn't in place.  What would be the point?  They're cutting their own throats, so to speak.   Glenn Z.