time for a career change

Every day at 3 minutes after 4, I get an automated email from our company's automated SPAM filter. For a long time, it used to simply say "Junk Emails Blocked: XX" Well, not "XX." It had a different number each day, but you get the point.

Anyway, that was all it said until about two weeks ago. Now, every time I get the automated message, it has a little graph on it that looks like this.



I'm flabbergasted by this. A software and technology company like Lucasfilm seems to get an average of about 15,000 decent, non-SPAM emails a day. And every day, we get slammed with about 4 million pieces of SPAM, most of which (but not all) get caught by our SPAM filter.

4 million unique messages about Viagra, "high quality" Rolex replicas, and mortgage offers that I wouldn't touch with an herbally-enlarged stick. How do those people make money? Is it truly just a numbers game? If you send out billions of messages a day and get a fraction of a fraction of a percent to respond, does that make you a viable business?

If it is a viable business, why aren't we all just sending email to each other for a living? Why would anyone want to be anything other than a SPAMmer when they grew up?