Spam/Junk Mail
 

I must get at least 30 junk mails every day - most go to my junk mail inbox.
I have always wondered what is the point of sending out e-mails that contain just links or nonsense. Does someone pay for this "advertising" ? If so, they can't be getting any return because if spam filters are detecting them, then only the foolish are opening them ?
Hopefully someone here can give the reason/s. I am sure that literally millions of junk mails do the rounds every day. Are these created by bots and then ping from server to server ? How do they find e-mail addresses to send to ?

Hundreds of millions a day are sent. Their simple mission; get a few thousand ppl to open the attached file, infect their computer and become unwitting zombies to send yet more spam. The implanted malware is controlled by a central command & control center which deploys orders from any number of sources, be they groups who rent the zombie horde as attack vectors to take down websites the group has beef with (like the ef bee eye's website) or the owners who use them to expand their horde by sending out millions upon millions of spam a day hoping to ensnare a few thousand more each time to count among their numbers of controlled zombies to then charge more for to bad guys to use b/c of shear numberd. 80% of daily email internet traffic are these spam networks sending out more emails every single day. Some get blocked, some get through & some get infected. Simple numbers game at that point.

P.S. get a good anti virus program (PC or Mac, it does NOT matter; PCs are targeted b/c they are +70% of the market, but that's changing & US targets are more valuable inherently, guess why; credit cards; and Mac is becoming more popular so it makes sense to target them if it gets them more zombiefied systems).
just be smart (obvious simplification) & you shouldn't have too many problems.

The 'foolish' ones are the ones they are hope to hook. People like us dont even look at them. Lol....Jean

There are enough idiots in the world that this pays off.
I'm always amazed how good google's junkmail filters are. One of my friends is a sysadmin at a university here. 3/4 of the incoming mail is immediately thrown away as definitely spam - it's a similar quantity across the internet.
One of the issues is that email is a very permissive system (by original design) and it costs essentially nothing to send (particularly if you use a botnet...).
Argh.

Yeah, it only takes a tiny percentage to respond, click on the link, download the file... whatever it is... and that is all they need because they send out so many million of these that a tiny percentage is still quite a lot of people.

People doing this are constantly trying to find ways of tricking the spam filters, then the spam filters catch up and the spammers find another way to trick them and it just keeps going and going and some get through and some are always successful :(