"We don't really track that history," Hormel representative Julie Craven said. "The kind of spam we like to talk about the most is the kind you eat."
That's not funny
Spam critics say the problem is no laughing matter, costing the economy in many ways. One is the time it takes people to weed through inboxes for spam and spam-boxes for legitimate email; filters notoriously mix up spam and nonspam. Then there is the cost of data that goes missing with the so-called false positives.
Second is that managing spam cuts into a company's IT budget, sucking up time and money that would have otherwise gone into product development or systems upgrades.
Then, there are the tight restrictions marketing departments have to observe in order to avoid the dreaded "spammer" label. That inhibition is particularly acute for vendors of certain pharmaceuticals that are mainstays of the spam diet.
"What if the company that produces Viagra ever wanted to send out an email?" Spira mused. "The value of that mark in that context has been utterly diminished."
With Viagra losing its trademark potency, corporations bleeding information technology time and money, and individuals and businesses alike losing patience and in some cases giving up, many are pinning their hopes on technology to solve the problem.
So far, spam has behaved like a wily retrovirus, adapting to whatever obstacles are thrown its way.
When companies began to employ filters that aim to identify and remove junk email by examining the subject line or content of the message for suspicious words, spammers started misspelling them. When email providers like Microsoft's Hotmail and Yahoo Mail started instituting visual verification tests to prevent computer-generated registration of accounts, spammers started using cheap African labour to pass those tests and open new accounts. Sophisticated spammers even use random-word generators to try to increase the number of false positives so that email users and providers have to turn off their filters.
Spam evolves on a three-month cycle, according to Burton Group analyst Fred Cohen.
Cohen -- who says he's personally received as many as 60,000 spams in a 24-hour period -- stresses that virtually no spam filter or deterrent can prevent the practice from being inherently profitable.
"You can send millions of spam emails a day for about a dollar," Cohen said. "That means if one in a million people buys something from you, you break even. Lists of validated bulk postal mail can cost a couple of cents to a dollar per person, and you can grab physical addresses of decision makers with buying power in Fortune 500 companies. But in spam, you don't have to be that selective. You could just say everyone in the United States."
And they do.
