{"id":887,"date":"2008-11-11T07:49:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-11T12:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicholsclan.com\/tinblog\/2008\/11\/the-futility-of-spam.html"},"modified":"2008-11-11T07:49:00","modified_gmt":"2008-11-11T12:49:00","slug":"futility-of-spam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2008\/11\/futility-of-spam.html","title":{"rendered":"The Futility of Spam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve often pondered how a sufficient number of people could be so stupid as to make spam email profitable.  And let&#8217;s face it, if it wasn&#8217;t making money, it would dry up overnight.  So someone is sending these goobers cash.  Well, it appears that I dramatically underestimated how few stupid people are required.  Bottom line, we&#8217;re doomed.<\/p>\n<p>UC <a href=\"http:\/\/www.techradar.com\/news\/computing\/spammers-get-1-response-to-12-500-000-emails-483381\">Berkley and San Diego scientists have studied<\/a> the actual reply rate of spam.  It turns out that only about 1 in 12m people actually purchase something solicited by spam.  This sounds innocuous, but given that billions of spam messages are being generated, the responses are able to reap the spammers about $7k\/day in income, even at the low response rate.  Hell, for $7,000 a day I should think about launching my own spam business.  Maybe I could bag up lawn clippings and sell them as an herbal libido enhancer.<\/p>\n<p>The cruel reality is that for spam to go away, we need to get the idiocy rate down well under 1 in 150 million people.  Like I said, we&#8217;re doomed.  Now if you&#8217;ll excuse me, I have to get back to a Nigerian Prince who requires my help.<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\">\n<h6><span style=\"font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;\">Brought to you by Tim&#8230;<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/\">-Read the whole blog here-<\/a><\/span><\/h6>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve often pondered how a sufficient number of people could be so stupid as to make spam email profitable. And<\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\"><a href=\"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2008\/11\/futility-of-spam.html\" title=\"Read The Futility of Spam\">Read more &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/887\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}