Subtract all the multimillion-dollar offers from Nigeria, the pitches for enlarging various body parts and the requests to visit NSFW Web sites and my inbox would still be full of spam offering the latest copies of software from Norton and Symantec and half-price subscription offers from the New York Times.
Chances are, these fine upstanding, reputable companies are not sending me spam. That would be wrong, wouldn't it? Instead, I've been hit by dweebs with affiliate programs. Amazon.com started the whole thing off by offering to pay people a cut of its book sales, but now everybody does it. And the result is growing volumes of spam from people who've enrolled in these programs (in fact, not so long ago, at least one scumware vendor tried the clever trick of adding its affiliate code to any Amazon URLs you might visit).
Latest to jump on the trend: Spam Arrest, which offers a service for eliminating spam.
As Ev notes, however, at least one Spam Arrest affiliate has already sent him spam:
Anti-spam companies should not have affiliate programs. It's likely to result in actions that reduce trust in your authenticity.Back to Compendium
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