Over at the O'Reilly Radar blog, there's an interesting post on spam and economics which makes a point I hadn't known about before:
And the spam messages that aren't advertisements, scams, or virus attacks, but just random strings of text?
Ken Simpson comments, "Those messages are sent by spammers to poison the spam filters. When someone receives a message full of gibberish and reports it as spam, the spam filters tune themselves to recognize gibberish as spam--which reduces their overall accuracy."
It also ranks the success rates of different kinds of spam - porn is highest, followed by pharmaceuticals and penny stocks.
