be bad form to blame the victim, but seriously, this is all our own damn fault. Spam persists because we keep buying V1aG3A, think we can earn $1,000 a week from home, and actually believe there’s a fortune in Africa we can get half of.

“It’s simple economics,” says Jamie Tomasello, abuse operations manager at Cloudmark, a major antispam firm. “We will see the end of spam when people stop responding to it.”

That’s the demand part of the equation; the supply side is equally daunting. “It costs $3,000 to rent a botnet and send out 100 million messages,” Gmail spam czar Brad Taylor says. “It takes only 30 Viagra orders to pay for that.”

And since there will always be suckers out there, the spam invasion will never stop—no matter what protective measures you take. Spammers will get your inbox’s coordinates if your email appears anywhere on the Web. If you don’t lock down your social network’s privacy settings, they’ll find you.

And history shows that these email hooligans are smart enough to evade even the most advanced defenses: When text filters started weeding out wordy solicitations, spammers switched to images. When Gmail employed optical character recognition to catch those messages, the spammers just broke up their pictographs into several blurry segments and foiled Skynet again. They take over abandoned and formerly reliable blocks of IP addresses to bypass blacklists. They use clever Javascript tricks to hide a message’s real content from patrolling algorithms.

Fortunately, the blockers are sophisticated, too, and have come up with new countermeasures to combat evil email missiles. But since you want to make sure legitimate messages don’t become collateral damage, filters have to stay a little bit loose. After all, your wife might actually be emailing you about working from home with Viagra. So if you have zero tolerance for false positives, some spam will inevitably sneak through.

Authors: Ryan Singel

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