Some of us were talking at work about something I’ve thought for a long time: spam just doesn’t make sense.

A coworker tried clicking on some spam a while ago. He was on a Mac and made sure the link wasn’t anything that contained unique identifiers. And none of the links worked. And then our site was inundated with spammers linking to nonexistent domains. I look up the domains, a long string of random characters: no whois record. And a lot of the spam that actually contains working links consists mostly of utter nonsense to try to slip past Bayesian filters.

And yet spam is presumably profitable, even though it seems that the majority of it leaves you unable to buy their products even if you wanted to.

Oh, here’s another fun one. We’ve been testing a new e-mail providers, which means that we’ve sent out tens of thousands of e-mails from a different IP than is listed in our SPF records. We’ve had just shy of 100% deliverability, suggesting that almost no one uses SPF.