1 That is just insane. Presumably the spam that you receive is automated as opposed to someone taking the time to enter it in?

I have a discussion board on my website and it is getting to the point I am having to remove spam postings several times a week. In order to post, a person has to go through a registration process and then respond to a validation email. Lately, I have been getting several registrations per day that end up never validating and which I assume are by would-be spammers, especially considering the sort of user names that are selected. My guess is that those attempts are made from some sort of automated web crawling spamming software.

For the spammer who makes it through my validation process, however, assuming he simply copied and pasted in his message, I figrure it would, at the very leas,t still require at least two minutes worth of his time to do so. Let's say that the spammer only values his time as being worth $10 per hour (a pretty pathetic way to earn $10 per hour if you ask me). That means he spent 20 cents worth of time posting a spam message to my board which, if he is VERY lucky and I am slow to catch it, MIGHT get 50 views (hasn't happened yet). If so and one measured it by cost per thousand impressions (CPM), the way that a lot of Internet ads are sold, his cost for that 20 cents worth of time would work out to about $6.60 per CPM. One can purchase LEGITIMATE Internet advertising for not a whole lot more than that - and my guess is the response rate to spam as opposed to more legitimate forms of online advertising is proabably THOUSANDS of times lower.

Either someone has figured out a way of automated the process of checking emails and validating registrations or spammers are an even more pathetic lot than I had ever imagined them to be.

2 I think my spam was from something automated because they happened over a very short period of time and spanned several posts.

It really is ridiculous and I'm not sure what these spammers hope to accomplish by spamming a small-time blog like mine.

3 Indeed. And I suspect even the big-time blogs become pretty small-time when one considers what I would guess is the relatively small percentage of readers who bother to read blog comments.

For a period of a few months, some spammer spoofed my primary public email address in the headers of a very heavy spamming campaign directed at Korean email addresses. Since the "from" headers suggested they came from me, I began receiving several THOUSAND bounce messages per day. At times, the bounces came in faster than I could delete them. What I had to do was create a filter where any sort of bounce message whatsoever was directly sent to my Trash folder - which meant that I was not informed of any legitimate bounces that might have happened to the emails that were actually sent out by me. It was a major nuisance - and had it happened back in the days when email account quotas were merely a few meg rather than a couple of gig, something like that could very well have closed down my email account for periods of time.

I hate spammers. They are evil people and ought to be forced to kiss Madeline Albright or something equally grotesque.