I stumbled across, Phil Bradley’s Great Spam Experiment the other day. In an entertaining, educational and borderline-scientific manner he answered the age-old question — where do we get spam?
First, he went looking for spam. He created about a dozen email accounts which would be publicized through various sites and services. For example, one account posted to a news group whereas another was simply included in an HTML mailto: link on his website.
Next, he waited for the spam to come rolling in — and it did. After about 12 weeks, he categorized the results and published the spam winners and losers.
I won’t ruin the surprise and tell you where the most spam is propagated from (okay, it’s from opting out of emails), but I will say that it was interesting to see that the majority of our spam falls into three categories: Financial, Pornographic and Health. Since Financial was the overall winner, I guess we’re going to have to start saying, “Money and Sex” rather than “Sex and Money.”
My thanks for Mr. Bradley for an entertaining article.