Map of Spam

I'll bet he just made a bunch of lines to random companies and said "Wow! spam map! yipee!"

Seems like something I would do.

(spam) --------> :angry: ---------> :gavel: -----------> (no more spam) ---------> 😃

That's my spam map.

edit: well, that's my ideal spam map.

I found Miss Cleo.

"Call me now. Hello? No, I don't need a new phone service!!!"

"Call me now. Hello? Life insurance? :angry: "

I'd be curious as to if that map was real or not. I don't think the email servers are on there. It seems more like you start at whoever managed to verify your email address and track from there where all that information gets spread.

My preferred spam map would be this
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dev/nul

i will say that whoever did that map,

A.had too much time on their hands and
B.probably used some sort of flowchart program since if you did it by hand... you would be almost screwed past like 30 - 40 interconnects.

It happens. We know why. That is worthless.

That's like mapping out my digestive tracts to explain to me why I crap.

Aaah, I dunno. If that is, in fact, real; then you could keep track of everyone who has your email addy.

Now that I think of it though, it's not really all that useful, is it? Oh well *shrug*

As it states clearly, the map isn't supopsed to be helpful to us. It is supposed to demostrate to advertisers the complex interactions that cause them to wind up with the email address of someone who doesn't want solicitous emails from them. If I had my guess, I'd say (without any real knwoledge of the details) that the map is probably fairly accurate; there's a lot of data and effort out there to combat spam, and I'd say this is a compilation of a lot of that data.

The key point of the map can be found if you pay attention. The legend has a symbol for <person>, i.e. the owner of an email address. They don't appear anywhere on the chart.

It seems kind of stupid to try to get people who want their stuff to buy it by sending them annoying emails. How do these spam company's make money?

Because advertisers pay the companies that send spam a certain amount per message sent. I guess they figure that if enough messages are sent some people will respond (which is probably true).

What we need is some way to prove where messages were sent from (i.e. some sort of route trace). That way spam could be stopped dead in its tracks.

I think all the hackers and virus makers out there could do us all a favor and put their skills to good use. 😉
Or is that too extreme?

No, no, no...

We need them to make more of these maps so we can.... have more maps of this kind of thing.

You know, I just a got an idea.

What if I sent this to every address I could get a hold of... Hmmmmm..l