A Day in the Life of a Spammer

This article depicts the life of a 20-something spammer. He works and plays hard, sometimes putting in 12 hour days.

The individual describes his "bulk e-mail marketing" activities as legal - and is frustrated that he's lumped together with illegal spammers and scammers. Shockingly, this person worked previously as a telephone marketer.

He initially started promoting other people's products for a cut of the action. Later he moved on to running his affiliate programs and employing other spammers.

Like all markets, he says that as more people have gotten involved it's proven harder to make money.

A typical campaign will involve sending 30 to 60 million email messages over the course of 3 or 4 days. The addressees are typically obtained by crawlers or robots that roam the internet looking for email addresses. Obviously, a large number of the addresses prove to be bogus. Fortunately many of the emails are caught by spam filters. None of them ever opted-in.

"You don't typically come up with 60 million e-mail addresses through a permission- based process."

SpamButcher is a free anti-spam download available from www.spambutcher.com and can effectively block spam email.

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