Do spammers give up?

[ssmith88]

Do spammers ever give up sending junk mail if using MW or other anti-spam? I don't know why they send not wanted email because I don't click their links.

I'm sure they send spam to annoy and not to sell.

[stan_qaz]

Spammers send normal spam with the intent to sell, you have to consider the cost to them of sending spam when looking at it. Most spammers are using insecure windows machines they have taken over to send the spam, that makes sending it nearly free. Since they can send for nearly nothing it only takes one response out of a million messages to make money.

Spammers send virus/worm/phish e-mails in the same way and at the same price so it only takes one in a million for them to come out ahead.

Spammers do send spam to annoy, but if that is happening to you you'd know it for sure since you would have 5000 or more messages in your inbox.

The only way to get rid of spammers that works today is to report them to spamcop.net, even that can take a while or be ineffective for some spammers. The reason it works is because when you report it blocks their ability to send out spam and that makes for extra work for them plus having to find new places to send from. The MW spamcop report tool makes it easy to report spam.

[ssmith88]

I'm sending reports to Spamcop but does that help because spammer will find somewhere else to send junk from.

[stan_qaz]

Sure the spammer will find somewhere else to send from but if you report them early and often they will see that by sending spam to your address they get blacklisted. After that happens a few times it is less work for the spammer to remove your name from his list than to keep hunting new spam senders. The spamcop folks call it "list washing" and try to activate new spamtraps to keep the spammer from washing the old ones out of their mailing list and escaping detection.

Bouncing used to work but these days it is a rare message that actually goes to the spammer, they either are dropped for invalid addresses or are used to mail-bomb someone that has ticked off the spammer. More and more ISPs are taking action to block bouncers or punish them for bouncing to addresses that the spam didn't come from.

[ssmith88]

it just seems that my spam comes from same domain and nothing is done about it. hotmail.com and alive.com appear to be popular with spammers

[stan_qaz]

Some places are very spammer friendly, sometimes ones you'd never expect like Google. they refuse to accept reports about folks using a Gmail address in the body of their spam for contacting them while keeping the forged header to hide their real location. Hotmail, a Microsoft service has always been spammer friendly.

It is nice to be able to look at the spamcop.net technical report and see where the spam truly came from rather than having to rely on the easily forged addresses in the incoming spam message.