Monday 12 August 2002

Pic of the day: Does your inbox look like a field of thistles? Evolution likes thistles.

Spammers are not idiots

Or at least not all spammers are severely retarded. We can verify this with a bowl of snacks. But I will return to the snacks later; for now, let us consider the menace of unsolicited commercial e-mail.

Some spammers do indeed seem to be victims of spam themselves. I also get the offers to buy millions of fresh e-mail addresses, so I assume that is what they have done. I don't expect them to get rich quickly that way: if I didn't respond to the mail from adfdsfwera123@whatmight.com, then I probably won't respond to the same mail from gkyuigyui654@hotmail.com either. But as the saying goes: There is a new sucker born every minute. So I suppose there are just enough of them to keep the chain of mail unbroken.

You would expect most people to be cynical enough to think like this: "If this guy could earn a fortune with little or no work, why would he not just continue to grab all the money himself?" It is not as if there is an upper limit to how much money people want, if they don't have to work for it. You can see this with lotteries: The larger the prize, the more people run to buy lottery tickets. This very fact means that each of them has less chance to win. And frankly, how much difference will it make to your happiness whether you win $1 million or $10 million? Do you think you would feel 10 times as happy? Do you even think that is possible? But still people run to buy their tickets. "Lottery is a tax on people who are bad at maths." And so is spam.

***

So far I seem to have argued against my original statement. It would seem that spammers are, if not idiots, at least not very bright. And I believe this to be true for the simple chain letter or MLM (multi-level marketing, a euphemism for pyramid scam). But porn is another matter.

I don't know how much porn spam I get over an average week. You see, I have a "multi level" spam filter in my e-mail program. First it picks out mail from a few friends. These go into named folders, one for each friend. Then the classic spam is weeded out and put in a folder named "spam". This is based on such criteria as the number of recipients, certain addresses and certain topics. Finally the rest of the mail is put in the inbox. I actually review the subject line of each mail, even those in the spam folder. But very quickly. Some of the mails in the inbox are also obvious spam, so are summarily killed without reading.

But for some reason some spammers use subject headers that look like a non-commercial mail. Sometimes this even persists well into the body of the message. For a while I thought this was just stupid: Were they just trying to irritate? After all, people would delete the message without responding, they would just had wasted a few more seconds first. And then I came to think of the snacks.

***

If you place a bowl of snacks on the table, you will probably not lose consciousness and only wake up when the bowl is empty or your stomach is full. Hopefully you will not even watch helplessly as your hand moves snacks into your mouth ... at least not until you take "just one" snack. Even then, you are probably able to stop at any time. (Whether or not you are willing to stop is another matter.) No, the interesting effect happens when you just let the bowl stand there and go on with you work. If these are snacks you truly like, you will find them more and more tempting as time passes. Unless you really love your work, you will find yourself more and more distracted by the snacks. Another possibility is that you will look up from your work and find your snacks gone, even if you are working alone. More likely you will notice that you have started eating snacks. The exact details vary, but the essence is this: Unbroken exposure to temptation will weaken resistance over time.

Now it so happens that to millions of men, porn is snacks. I am sorry about that, and if there is anything I can do about it, I'll be glad to help. But for some reason, this is how it works. Now we can understand: With repeated exposure, there is a gradually increasing chance that the average man will click on a porn link. The spammer cannot know his place in the line of spams. All he knows is that people respond to a small fraction of the mails every time. Like running water undercuts the river bank, so repeated temptation undercuts human willpower. (Willpower can be trained, but this isn't easy. Perhaps I shall write more about that in the future, if any.)

Now it so happens that traditional porn isn't snacks to me. It ranges from amusing to disgusting. Yes, I have seen some of it. I used to read some soft porn which my brother had left for me. (At least I think it was my brother – I can't imagine who else it should be.) But it didn't take long before I realized that I could do better in my sleep...

Perhaps I will eventually get heaps and heaps of spam saying "click here for the best superhero comics on the Net". Then we will see just how long my willpower lasts...

PS: Loquendi libertatem custodiamus.