I get a moderate amount of comment spam here on the blog. Fortunately, WordPress lets me moderate comments before they’re posted, and it’s pretty easy to separate the signal from the noise. Most of the comment spam is pointers to pharmacy web sites or links to porn sites. Some, though, are really random. Like the one I got today: “Sorry, but what is kimerikas? Jane.” That was the entire comment. Always willing to learn something new, I searched Google for “kimerikas,” and got about 900 hits. I didn’t look at all of the hits, but the few pages I did look at all contained identical comments. If anybody knows what kimerikas is, please let me know.

Another comment spam I got recently was for a piece of software that will post trackbacks to multiple blogs. Yes, you got that right: spam offering a spam generator.

It continues to amaze me that spam in all forms is still prevalent. Is there any research to indicate that spam is profitable? I’m sure it’s profitable for the big outfits that send spam on behalf of other people (i.e. they get paid to flood my email with trash), but do the people who pay these outfits actually see a return on their spam investments? With most major mail servers’ frontline filters throwing out the vast majority of spam, and the few stragglers being easy to identify and delete manually, how can anybody make money trying to advertise this way?