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@PeterLudemann @dalias @lauren

In other words, you have no idea how difficult it is to block spam, either incoming or outgoing.

That is logically inconsistent with the notion that I had to personally handle how much I received.

Enough gets blocked that it is nontrivial to get through lastingly

Have you any idea of the volume of spam that major providers such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo receive and mostly block?

I thought not.

That is irrelevant to the point of view of a company considering ads vs spamming in hopes of sales. The odds of it being blocked or requiring constant labor & costs to avoid it get worse the better adversaries are at blocking.

That others don't get blocked or evaded a block doesn't matter. What matters is purely themselves.

It doesn't make sense to even consider the costs of spamming when ad networks are around.

Of course this is besides the fact that socially, products advertised by spam are typically expected to be scams (much like products that are too aggressively advertised). So spamming is quite possibly actively detrimental.

So getting enough marks that buy into spam to actively provide a signal back with identifiable information that makes it back to the original master for surveillance purposes? That kind of operation with physical mail would have the kind of costs and inefficiency that would make many parties give up on the notion entirely.

With email just opening it for checking would possibly provide a signal, but it is common now for "Unknown senders" to have most automatic signal-sending methods disabled in Email clients & web clients. So one is back to needing some level of victim buy-in/cooperation.

If this is true, then why is there so much spam? (See above - most of it gets blocked ... at one point ~90% of email traffic was spam but nowadays I think it's ~50%)

People are idiots. But also a lot spammers truly are scams and have the same lack of qualms as scammers usually display.

That is then not for surveillance, but because one mark out of thousands or millions that buys it and gets taken for all they're worth can more than offset the cost of getting to them, even with limited information value/observation (not necessarily true since exploiting someone this way can also involve stealing their ID for resale) and a lack of expectation of repeat business.

It is an entirely different business model.

What is your definition of "surveillance"? Showing adverts based on search queries is hardly "surveillance".

Deliberate information and data gathering or processing for purposes which intentionally lend themselves to things resembling intelligence work, whether on a personalized or mass scale, for any purpose.

That would be a workable definition.

Incidental or accidental mass gathering & processing of the same is something that can be called negligence.