Spammers, spammers everywhere

It's a common misconception that spammers spam because they make money from spamming. Some indeed do, but what makes it so easy to spam is not that it can earn the spammer money, but that it costs the spammer very little to spam. This is partly because Internet access is cheap, and partly because the structure of the Internet currently makes it easy for spammers to evade detection and penalties.

This leads to some major classifications of types of spammers:

Spam-for-hire, aka "email marketing" firms, aka "mainsleazers"

These people form companies that purport to advertise the services of other companies by email. What those other companies tend not to realize is that they pay money to drag their own names through the mud.

Marginal marketers, aka "chickenboners"

These people sell goods or services of dubious legality, assuming they actually provide anything in return for any money sent to them.

Scammers and outright criminals

A common example is "419" spammers who promise you a share of some dead African dictator's bankroll if you give them access to your bank account. More recently "phishing" spam attempts to trick you into supplying details about your bank account or credit cards so the phishers can steal your money, or "spear-phishers" who try to trick you into revealing email account information so they can take over your email account and use it to spam.

Robospam

A lot of spam now comes from email worms and other self-propagating programs, which multiply in the rich compost heap of unsecured hosts on the Internet (such as Windows systems or insecure web applications) like maggots.

Unbelievably important messages

Sometimes there's no money involved, they just have to tell you about the coming end of the world or their desperate need to obtain glowing blue moon crystals to build their time machine.

It's also been observed that the behavior of many spammers is clearly sociopathic -- they spam because they enjoy it, despite its social costs, and while they might claim financial benefit, that's not the real reason it motivates them.

These are the reasons why spam is really a social problem, not a technical problem -- spammers have always evaded or subverted any technical means used against them.

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