Perhaps the ultimate demonstration of just how low a click-through rate spammers need in order to justify sending emails is the huge number of messages written in Asian scripts that I receive every day. Since my email address is posted in several places on several different websites, it it unsurprising that all manner of spam robots have collected it. Because of my general willingness to give my ‘real’ email address to various websites and companies, I generally get more than 100 spam messages a day. Thankfully, GMail catches nearly all of them.
Given that all the websites from which my email address has been taken are in English, you would think that an even moderately intelligent spam robot would direct English spam towards addresses listed thereon. I now get more than twice as much non-English spam as English spam, and almost all of that in Asian scripts. Not that I mind being the target of Chinese, Japanese, and other sorts of spam – I don’t even need to skim the titles to know that they aren’t for me.
Taju kage bunshin no jutsu!
I am told that more than half the text on the Internet is already in Chinese. It is pretty obvious, then, that more and more of the spam will be.
You’ll just have to stop trawling through Naruto fanfic forums…