As Ben Macklin, a senior analyst of eMarketeer, writes, billions of dollars yearly are spent to mend damage made by spam. But who is the receiver of our money?

First there are the sole spammers, Macklin says that 200 top spammers are responsible for 80% of spam. Then there are companies who buy their illicit services:

"According to recent news reports, a well-organized spammer can send between 60 and 70 million e-mails a day (two billion a month). On average, there is a positive response to 0.05% of those e-mails, potentially delivering 36,000 e-mail leads per day to the companies that use spam."

And last, but not least, there are also network operators and ISP providers who let spam through their systems. Macklin asks readers to visit this site to see who the worst perpetrators are.

But the thing that surprised me personally is that we always imagined spam to come from dimly lit Russian basement rooms, or from some distant oriental country - the fact is that far the most spam is 'manufactured' and distributed in USA. As this site states, America is the spam haven for over 2300 spam organizations.

So I ask you, who else might be getting money from spam? Could it be the vendors who produce spam cleaners? Or could it be the hosting people who sell more and more space for larger and larger mailboxes? And following that lead, could it be the producers of hardware, such as hard drives, power supplies, cables and everything else needed to make a server? Bit of a conspiracy theory, don't you think?

I'll let you ponder over this one, and hope you're not among 36000 people who will buy something advertised through spam. It's bad enough we have to endure commercials on TV, papers and busses.