Spam Slayer: Meet Average-Joe Spammer

"Q: Are anti-spam laws and better filters working to stop spammers?
A: Yes. Today big ISPs block e-mail from suspicious sources. They filter out spam based on e-mail addresses, words, links in the e-mail, pictures, or anything. For people like me it's just not worth it anymore. However, this forces a lot of spammers to send more spam. In the old days you could earn, say, $1000 by sending out 20,000 spam messages. Today, to earn $1000, you have to send out 2 million spam messages or more. The better filters get, the more determined we will get. It's not as if spammers really want to break the law. It's just that we are looking for any edge possible to get past the filter. Right now we are targeting smaller ISPs that don't have a lot to spend on good spam filters." Source: abcnews.go.com