Some spam never dies.

Right now I have a special folder containing 17 pieces of spam. Each one of these is a message that SpamButcher failed to catch sometime in the last 72 hours. It's my job to research, and then make sure SpamButcher knows how to delete junk mail like them in the future.

Surprisingly, a good number of these messages seem to be direct decedents of spam templates or forms that have been around for years. Sometimes I'll come across highly unique phrases that can be found in similar spam messages reported on the UseNet going back to the late 1990's.

This is expected with some scam-spam, especially those classic 419 scam messages originating from Nigeria. Thousands of would-be scammers perpetually recycle the same form letters. Millions of messages are sent daily to potential victims around the planet. Many of these schemes predate widespread use of the internet itself. Originally, they were sent via fax or traditional physical mail.

More surprising are the other kinds of conventional spam that seem to be progressing through time. Email advertisements for products and services claiming to enhance your manhood or get you a degree fast seem to have persisted over the years virtually unchanged. Frustratingly, there seem to have been so many thousands of different mini-campaigns overtime, that targeting them one-by-one would do little to block mail that's unwanted.

Perhaps the same actual software is being used to send some spam now that was being used five or six years ago. Once software is made available via a distributed file sharing network it could bounce around independent of spammer's websites being taken offline. Ongoing affiliate programs may also be partially to blame.

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