Let's be honest. Nobody actually wants a folder full of junk. Yet, here we are in 2026, and our digital lives are still drowning in it because the various ways to make spam have become incredibly sophisticated, blurring the lines between aggressive marketing and actual malicious activity. It’s not just about Nigerian Princes anymore. It’s about high-velocity, automated systems that exploit every single crack in the internet’s foundation.
If you’ve ever wondered why your phone pings at 3:00 AM with a "delivery failure" notification for a package you never ordered, you're looking at the end product of a massive, multi-billion dollar shadow industry. Spam isn't an accident. It's a calculated engineering feat.
The Architecture of Modern Inbox Intrusion
Most people think spam is just a guy hitting "send" on a big list of emails. That's old school. Today, the primary ways to make spam involve massive botnets—networks of compromised devices, from smart refrigerators to high-end servers—that distribute the load so no single IP address gets flagged too quickly.
Spammers use tools like GSA Search Engine Ranker or custom-built Python scripts to scrape the web for footprints. They aren't just looking for your email address. They want your API keys. They want your open contact forms. They want any "hole" where they can inject content.
Snowshoe Spamming Explained
Ever heard of snowshoeing? No, not the winter sport. In the world of high-volume messaging, "snowshoe spamming" is a technique where the sender spreads their messages across a vast range of IP addresses and domains. By keeping the volume low on each individual IP, they stay under the radar of filters like Spamhaus or Cloudmark. It's like walking on deep snow with snowshoes; you spread your weight so you don't sink.
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Content Spinning and the Rise of AI Garbage
You’ve probably seen those weirdly phrased comments on blog posts that almost make sense but feel "off." That's content spinning. Traditionally, spammers used software to swap out synonyms—replacing "buy" with "purchase" or "get"—to create thousands of "unique" versions of the same pitch. This was done to bypass "fuzzy matching" algorithms used by Gmail and Outlook.
But now? They're using Large Language Models.
The newest ways to make spam involve prompt engineering to generate "human-like" outreach at scale. It’s a literal arms race. Security experts like Brian Krebs have frequently pointed out that as soon as a defense is built, the "bad actors" find a way to automate the workaround. They use AI to solve CAPTCHAs, write convincing phishing lures, and even mimic the tone of a specific brand’s customer service department.
How They Get Into Your "Discover" Feed
This is the part that really annoys Google. Lately, spammers have moved beyond the inbox and into "Discover" and "Top Stories." This is often referred to as "SEO Spam" or "Parasite SEO."
Basically, they find a high-authority website—maybe a local newspaper or a university site—with weak security. They inject thousands of pages about "best weight loss gummies" or "crypto giveaways" into a subfolder of that trusted site. Because Google trusts the main domain (like university.edu), the spammy pages rank almost instantly.
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It's a parasitic relationship. The spammer gets the traffic; the site owner gets a manual penalty from Google once they finally catch on.
The Technical Infrastructure: Bulletproof Hosting
You can't just host a spam operation on Bluehost or Wix. They’ll shut you down in ten minutes.
Pro spammers rely on "bulletproof hosting." These are data centers, often located in jurisdictions with lax cyber-law enforcement (think parts of Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia), where the providers intentionally turn a blind eye to abuse complaints. They charge a premium for this "service."
They also use:
- Proxies: Specifically residential proxies that make the traffic look like it's coming from a normal home internet connection in Ohio rather than a server farm in Russia.
- Domain Tasting: Registering thousands of domains and dropping them within the five-day "grace period" to avoid paying for them while still using them for short-term blasts.
- SMTP Relays: Hijacking the mail servers of legitimate small businesses to send out blasts.
Why Does It Still Work?
Psychology. It’s a numbers game.
If you send 10 million emails and only 0.001% of people click and buy a counterfeit watch or download a malware-laden PDF, you’ve still made a profit. The cost of sending those 10 million emails is effectively zero once the infrastructure is set up.
There’s also the "fear factor." Phishing—a specific subset of the various ways to make spam—relies on urgency. "Your account will be deleted in 2 hours." "Unrecognized login detected." When we're stressed, our brains skip the logical check of "Does this email address look weird?" and go straight to "I need to fix this."
The Legal Landscape (Or Lack Thereof)
We have the CAN-SPAM Act in the US and GDPR in Europe. They help, sure. But spammers don't exactly follow the law.
Legal experts like those at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have argued for years that while legislation is a tool, the real battle is technical. If the cost of sending spam remains lower than the potential reward, spam will exist.
Actionable Steps to Protect Your Digital Space
You can't stop the world from making spam, but you can stop it from hitting your screen.
- Use Aliases: Services like Firefox Relay or SimpleLogin let you create "throwaway" email addresses for every site you sign up for. If one starts getting spam, you just kill that one alias.
- Hardware Security Keys: If you’re worried about the phishing side of spam, get a Yubikey. Even if a spammer tricks you into giving them your password, they can't get into your account without that physical key.
- Check Your "Leaked" Status: Use HaveIBeenPwned to see which of your accounts were involved in a data breach. If your email is on a "spam list," it’s because it was leaked from a legitimate site years ago.
- Report, Don't Just Delete: When you hit "Report Spam" in Gmail, you're actually training the global filter. You’re helping the "herd immunity" of the internet.
- DNS Filtering: Use a service like NextDNS or Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 (Family) at the router level. This can block known spam and phishing domains before they even reach your device.
The landscape of spam is shifting from simple annoyance to complex social engineering. Understanding that these messages are products of a highly automated, industrialized system is the first step in staying skeptical. Treat every unsolicited "urgent" notification as a technical maneuver rather than a legitimate communication. Stay sharp. The bots certainly are.