[supercat]

If I had to hypothesize, I'd say it's entirely possible that the difference in cost between spamming those who don't go to the effort of avoiding spam, and spamming those who do, is so little that it makes no real difference to the spammers.

The cost to find a spam-resistant email address is non-trivial. Even if someone who's only making $6/hour can find two a minute, that's still $0.05 each. Even if they do ten a minute, that's $0.01 each.

How is anybody who is engaged in such a practice going to come anywhere near breaking even? To be sure, spammers exchange lists a lot, so a person who's gif-cloaked email address gets found out once will receive spam from all over, but how does that benefit the person who found it first?

As noted, the only thing I can figure is either that the person who's going through the trouble of listing such addresses expects to make money selling lists of "Addresses not found on any other list!!!!!!!!" or else views the annoyance of the addressee as being a meaningful objective in and of itself.

[AM2000]

You probably already know this, but e-mail harvesting software is how people "find" e-mail addresses. From newsgroups, or even by just looking for patterns in intercepted HTTP traffic. The only cost is that of writing the software, once that's set up you just let it run and it harvests for you.

And then when you want to send spam, all you need is a list of addresses and an smtp server.

Or is there more to it and I just don't realize it?