Answer Line: Why do I get so much spam? Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam!
Spam! Carol asked why there's so much of it. Why are there so
many unwanted, tricky, manipulative, annoying, dangerous, and
often illegal email messages going around? Because unscrupulous
people can make a tidy profit mailing Spam. In 2010, Gmail spam
expert Brad Taylor told Wired that “It costs $3,000 to rent a
botnet and send out 100 million messages. It takes only 30
Viagra orders to pay for that.” Botnets--illegal networks of
infected computers controlled by people other than their
legitimate owners--make an important part of the spam equation.
Not only do they send out a great deal of spam, but their owners
use spam to infect more computers, and thus grow their botnets.
These spammers can get your email address from all sorts of
sources. They can search infected PCs for anything that looks
like an address. They can read them off of incoming and outgoing
email. Hackers can break into e-tailers' databases and steal
addresses (and worse). Posti