Having worked at a spam marketing company for a while, I have learned several things that one can do to help in the fight against spam.
Why do spammers spam?
Lets face it, email is cheap. Many spam companys can buy email lists for dollars per 100k. Statistically around 10% of people who click on the email, purchase the item... not a bad conversion. At my place of employment, we averaged around a 60% conversion (somewhat of an industry phenom). Why were ours so high? We bought targeted lists (lists that consisted of known buyers, and were of the demographic that fit the product we were advertising). We also staged our website advertising so that it ran alongside television advertising (if you have ever seen a commercial about "as seen on television", my former company probably had some hand in the web advertising for it). This resulted in something like a brute force approach to saturating our audience with advertisements.
I'm not impressed Kyle, get to the point...
Ok, Ok. How do spammer's make their money? Many times they get paid on a CPA (cost per acquisition) basis, and other times they get paid on and ROI basis (the advertising company will pay for 'x' acquisitions... they don't care how many emails are sent out, or anything like that, so the marketing company will send out as many as they have to in order to hit their target). So how do you make it less profitable for spam marketing companies to send out spam? Visit every website that they promote (and of course DON'T PURCHASE!!!)!
What did you say???
I know, every day it seems like their is more and more malicious code being injected into webpages, and to actually go out and seek those webpages seems a bit masochist. So proceed with caution. What is done by visiting their website is decreasing their Conversion percentage, which gives the appearance of making them less effective.
If the website has a streaming video on it, watch it SEVERAL times, and get your friends to watch it. Why? Bandwidth is NOT cheap. Every video they stream is money out of their pocket. Many of the companies also track their streams, so the increase in streams also yields a lower conversion. Huh? Companies pay the marketing companies per stream, and if those streams are maxxed out quickly and yield no results, then they are less likely to advertise on that medium again.
Thats it?
Pretty much. Just think of it this way. spam companies only have to initiate contact, and wait for a purchase. If people actively eat up their resources, it becomes less profitable to be in that business.
Warning!
Use discretion when using this approach. If you don't know how to secure your computer, then you won't know how to clean up if you end up with a trojan.