Ask HN: Why is spam email still a thing?

If you've had an email account for a while you probably know what I'm talking about. Open your spam folder and undoubtably it's filled with poorly written and worded emails still advertising "free sex", "you've won", "open for a gift card" or otherwise.

These emails are so bad and there is almost no chance of them finding their way through a spam filter, why are people still sending them?

Total speculation: there are billions of people with access to the Internet. Every once in a while one of them says, "Maybe I'll try the Nigerian prince thing." Maybe it works, but maybe it never does. It is just that people can try it, basically for free, so some do.

Simply, it works some % of the time greater than 0 and it costs close to nothing to send it.

It still works. You don't need a lot of little old men buying knockoff Viagra or little old ladies looking for love to make a decent wage in a lot of countries. Also, you take for granted that everyone is benefiting from Google and Microsoft's SPAM filters attached to GMail and O365/Outlook. There are still a LOT of email addresses running on SMTP or even POP3. And a LOT of those email addresses are legacy addressses still in use by people that are rich targets for SPAM: old peopl using the addresses set for them in the 90's. A non-zero number of the messages that make it to your SPAM folder actually wind up in inboxes. Which inboxes? The ones that don't have good SPAM detection and, more importantly, are used by people that don't get a lot of email and may well be thirsting for connection. My parents practically dive over furniture during dinner to answer the phone just to see who it is. This behavior extends to inboxes for a lot of people.

Sadly, better SPAM filter technology won't be the end of SPAM. SPAM will lose its efficacy when old, unfiltered inboxes stop being used. And they will stop being used when the (largely) older demographic stops using them as a result of the passing of time.

I think of spam like a lot of direct physical mail. There’s two effects going on:

1. People will continue to use an easy tool even if it has become ineffective, because it’s available. It doesn’t take many spammers to send 100,000,000,000 emails. Direct mail isn’t what it used to be, but it’s baked into the systems for every car dealership and so it continues. Spam is probably 1000x less effective than it was in 2002, but most spammers aren’t running A/B tests either.

2. Just like direct mail, it’s easy to think that no one looks at spam because I don’t. In fact, there really are a lot of people who look at every coupon in the Captain D’s flyer. Same thing with spam…even if the open rate is 0.1%, that could still be 1 in 1000 people.