http://www.businessweek.com/ap/tech/D8K44CDO0.htm

Has anyone heard about this story?

He rented 35 servers in Holland for $ 10.000 each/month

Why on earth would someone do this...I'm puzzled!

LaoPo

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/tech/D8K44CDO0.htm

Has anyone heard about this story?

He rented 35 servers in Holland for $ 10.000 each/month

Why on earth would someone do this...I'm puzzled!

LaoPo

Quite simple really. He's making a ton of money from it.

That's the whole purpose behind spam emails. You send as many as possible out, and hope that a tiny percentage of them generate a response (even if the responder doesn't buy a product or join a site, by responding they have verified that their email address is valid. The spammer can then sell that address to other spammers).

If only a tenth of 1 percent (0.1%) of the recepients respond, thats over 2 million people. If only a hundreth of 1 percent (0.01%) purchase a product or pay to join a site, that's over 200,000 paying customers !

Think about this. Spam of a different sort. Banks and other financial insitutes in the USA send out around 3 billion credit card applications a year to people in the US. That's about 10 applications for every citizen in the country. Their hope is that a tiny percentage of those people will fill out an application. Even if those people are dirt poor, the banks want a crack at what ever money they do have.

And if some of those people default on their payments, the banks can write off the bad debts in order to reduce the taxes they owe on their huge yearly profits. (Actually, they often write off the debt as a loss, then "sell" the accounts of the defaulters to collection agencies. The collection agencies buy the accounts for a percentage of the debt and then tries to recuperate the full amount owed).

Sooo, the email spammers are really just trying to do what the financial insitutes have already been doing for years. The difference is, many places have made it illegal to spam people through email, but not through your mailbox.

(ps. I hate those spamming buggers. I was offline for a week. Went to check one of my rarely used email accounts and found 376 emails. 374 were spam ! )

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam...

Spam, spam, spam, egg, sallad and spam.

Spam, spam, chips, beans & spam, with extra chips ... that's the non-diet menu.

Hope that the spammer gets a 'stiff' jail-sentence, I reckon I got a few hundred unwanted messages, from him, myself.

I hated the original SPAM (that meat-like substance that people in the US seem to live on).

My unit did an exercise with an American unit in Washington (state) one year. The Americans served SPAM twice a day. One day you'd get it (fried) for breakfast, and possibly boiled for lunch. Another day you'd have it sliced (for sandwiches) for lunch and fried for supper.

Little wonder all the American troops carried bottles of Tabasco sauce with them. They needed something to kill the taste.

Too bad it doesn't work on email spam though. The only thing nice about email spam is you can't taste it !

I kinda like spam. The food-version that is.