what about the spam?

I just cleaned out the bulk box in my yahoo account, partially to procrastinate, partially to see if anything had accidently gotten directed there.

I remember when we first got the internet at my parent's place, my father was always freaking out, telling us that we were under no circumstances to open an email when we didn't know the sender, or the message was bulk-forwarded. At times I had to call friends to make sure they had in fact sent me the chain letter that would promise upon opening dismemberment, nightmares, eternal happiness, true love, and an endearing if medically unsound puppy if i did/not foward the message to the requisit number of people in 17.5 nanoseconds.

Upon growing up a bit and going to college, I did all the very evil things I was always told I couldn't, like take online quizes and give my email address to astrology sites. Oh, I felt very rebellious. And of course, as promised, I am now flooded with spam. At first it was a terribly exciting novelty, I now understand what veryone's talking about! I would read it for entertainment value. It soon got too plentiful and repetitive, though.

But spam's really weird when you sit down and think about it. You know, like, how does the filter recognize the emails? I'm guessing it's sheer number of sendees, given that most of the stuff that ends up in my inbox has a list of a dozen or so people. Can you make money writign spam? Is it something electronically generated and sent, or does someone have to sit there each day, look themselves in the mirror and know "I am a spammer, I hit 'send to the world' every single day offering all sorts of free things and nuisances." And what about that really creative spam? You know, the bizarre excerpts of stories with some sort of financial advice woven in, or those guys in Africa who need an American bank account & liason, promising a return of millions for your thousands. I always give them credit for the originality of their plight.

Can one be a professional spammer? Would you do freelance or be hired by a company? Would you only write spam for one company/product line, or are their spam co-ordinaters, parent spam companies?

This whole dating things forward by 30ish years confuses me. Mostly because I want to know if there's a coalition of spammers who got together & decided 2037 is going to be a fabulous year, or if they're all the same parent feed, or if someone's marketing spammer software or what. I et why one would foward-date mail, I just don't get why that specific year.

Though I don't know if it's entirely correct on the etymology, wikipedia has an interesting, amusing article on the subject.