How One Spam Leads to Another

The quantity of e-mailed advertising pitches for different opportunities is about to increase dramatically, according to research by Bob West, an anti-spam activist. E-mail addresses are the currency in a financial shell game that involves rapidly moving consumer contact information from database to database while concealing where and how the data was collected, according to West's research, which he has documented in a map that painstakingly details all the dark and twisted paths that your e-mail address has been traveling. Spammers harvest e-mail addresses from websites and public posts on Internet newsgroups and bulletin boards and then sell the addresses to other spammers, or to unscrupulous marketing companies who pay a bounty fee per submitted name. These marketing lists may eventually be sold to legitimate companies who often believe they are purchasing a list of eager consumers' addresses. One end result of all this activity is, rather obviously, more spam showing up in already jammed inboxes. West said his research indicates that unless consumers complain publicly and loudly about the promiscuous passing around of their e-mail addresses, spam will make the mailboxes of most Internet users virtually unusable within the next six to nine months ... "a year if we're lucky." Other anti-spam activists agreed that spam is proliferating, but pointed out that West's "Spamdemic Map" doesn't indicate any concepts that aren't already widely understood.