Why Does Spam Keep Coming?

Spam makes spammers money. It's hard to believe, but there are people out there that receive spam email, click the offer, and buy the advertised product. Now, you might think, why would anyone do that? Who knows , but they do because the spam keeps coming.

Personally, I think spam is perpetrated by people like that slightly evil kid in chess club. You know, the one that smelled vaguely sour and hiked his shorts too high in gym class. In reality, spammers are just business peopleokay, slimy business peoplebottom feeding on yet another Internet opportunity.

Nevertheless, you don't need much more than Grade 9 math to figure out that if you send a lot of emails, a small percentage of the recipients read the email and an even smaller percentage buy the advertised product. Small as it is, it's income with a scaleable formula. If you can send millions of messages for the price of an Internet connection and a computer, you've got an almost free distribution system. And if it costs almost nothing to send and produces an income of any kind, it's profitable. So the spam keeps coming.

Lovely Spam, Wonderful Spaaaaaam!

The origin of the term spam comes from a sketch by the British comedy troupe Monty Python. They did a bit on a restaurant that only featured dishes made with SPAM (note the uppercase), which is a canned ham product from Hormel. When the waitress describes items on the menu, a group of Vikings sing a song that goes something like "SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM. Lovely SPAM, lovely SPAM..." So spam was thus named because, like the song, it is an endless repetition of worthless text.