[Graybeard58]

spammers have a one in 40,000 hit rate for the products<.i>

Hard to believe that even one person in 40,000 would respond. Of course there are a lot of democrats in the world.

[El Sordo]

I'm surprised it's that high.

I'd have guessed 1 in 10,000 or lower.

[ASA Vet]

The 20 or so spams I'm getting per hour now mostly are 2K,
with a subject line "Hi," and from obscure female names.
Last week they used subject line "Do you love me?"

[weegee]

I wonder what the hit rate is for the Nigerian scammers. They've taken in Harvard Professors and other "smart" people (can you believe that they get to cast votes too?).

[duckman]

I have been receiving a lot of spam with gibberish in the leading paragraphs. Just nonsense words strung together. This has been happening for several months. It may be spam for insurance or mortgage or even pharmacy products. What is this all about? Anyone have any info?

[boris]

I got one yesterday that really torqued me off. It was from a "bank" I don't have an account with. "Your account is being accessed by an unknown third party" it warned, helpfully giving me a URL to click...

I reported them to the FBI.

--Boris

[backhoe]

Things you need(all FREE)
Anti-Virus
AVG Avast
Firewall
Kerio(Direct Download) Zone Alarm
Misc.
IE Spyads SpywareBlaster Spyware Guard
Windows Update
get all CRITICAL Updates

Things you want(Still Free)
Mozillia Firefox
Google Toolbar (stops pop-ups)
Ad-Aware
Spybot S&D
MS MVP Hosts file

MailWasher: Good for pre-screening & bouncing SPAM

---

How did i get infected in the first place?

---

[OldFriend]

Got a scam email this afternoon pretending to be from earthlink. Asking me for my credit card number because my account was unpaid.

Earthlink aware of this and now is adding a scam protector as well as a spam protector to their website offerings.

[Positive]

Ahhh Viagra plus:
VIAAGRA plus:
VIAAGGRA plus:
VIAGGRA plus:
V I A G R A plus:
V I AA G R A plus:
V I AA GG R A plus:
V I A GG R A plus:
V,I,A,G,R,A plus:
V-I-A-G-R-A plus:
V+i+a+g+r+a plus:
vairga plus:
.etc and so on.

I could have gone on with countless other permutaions. What really makes me curious is; what makes these idiots think that I would be interested in their Viagra if I have filtered the actual word from my inbox?

[supercat]

Someone needs to file some class-action lawsuits as spammers. Not for any outrageously-huge amount of money--maybe even just $0.0016 each [one second of labor at $6.00/hour]. That would actually be a class-action lawsuit where I wouldn't even mind too much if lawyers swallowed up most of the winnings.

[y2k_free_radical]

there's a sucker born every minute and some go around more than once

[steve-b]

I am about 90% certain that, if the Feds would get off their duffs and investigate, they would find that spam is being used as a terrorist comm channel. Any evildoer who is even slightly familiar with the Net would recognize it as the perfect way to avoid traffic analysis (study of who is sending messages to whom, without necessarily knowing anything about the content of the messages), which is why I don't feel impelled to refrain from pointing it out in public.

IMO, it's long past time for the Feds to do some serious anal-probing of known spam operations (even a cursory reading of spam spewings will provide probable cause for a plethora of IRS, FDA, SEC, and other three-letter-agency investigations) and check out their clients for terrorist connections.