A former spammer known only as "Ed" or "Spammer X" has been talking about spam at an event hosted by Ironport Systems. I know I'm going to Hell, Spammer X told the assembled attendees, before making a plea for them to think of him as a nice guy, really.

Spammer X is just the latest in a long line of 'repentant' spammers that includes Sanford Wallace and Ryan Pitylak (although apparently Wallace had a little difficulty staying out of the game after his much-publicized conversion). Spammer X has a book to push, so perhaps he has more incentive than most for going straight, but it's hard to see why anyone would give up the $15,000/week he claims to have made for anything as insubstantial as a newly-discovered sense of morality and a book contract.

Spammer X's revelations aren't particularly earth-shattering, but he does confirm a few things we'd long suspected. In particular, his comments on the subject of 'Internet pharmacies' are interesting:

... the product is always counterfeit to some degree. If you're lucky, sometimes it's a diluted version of the real thing ... Viagra is cut with amphetamines, and homemade pills are common from sketchy labs in countries such as China, India and Fiji ...

Anti-spam campaigners will tell you — correctly, in my view — that spam is about consent, not content. In other words, what makes it spam is not what the message says, but whether you asked to get it or not. Nevertheless, it doesn't hurt to look at the content too and one of the things about spam is that it is overwhelmingly used to service fraud, where "overwhelmingly" translates to 99%

Take a look at the contents of your junk mail folder. What do you have? You've probably got a lot of pharmacy spam. There's good reason to believe that some of these are simply scams designed to steal your credit card number but if you're really unlucky they might actually sell you something and if you're really stupid, you might take it. As Spammer X has told us, you can expect to get expired medications, sugar pills, speed packaged to look like Viagra and the random output of some backstreet third-world drug lab. Want to put that in your body? I didn't think so.

You'll probably also have a few hundred messages offering to enlarge your penis. Guys, I hate to break it to you, but you can eat all the sugar pills you want, your pride and joy is going to stay exactly the same size it has always been. Repeat after me. Penis. Enlargement. Pills Do. Not. Work. So that's a straight-out scam too.

Fake watches? Here the spammers are at least upfront about what they're selling, although they prefer to call their products 'replicas' rather than 'fakes'. They make extravagant claims about how rich and sophisticated their Rolex knockoffs will make you look, although how sophisticated you'll look when the strap goes green and the numbers have come off the face and are floating around behind the crystal is a good question. Even if you think you really want a knockoff designer watch, you can guarantee that you're paying more than it's worth.

How about that so-called "OEM" software? There's another word for that. It's called 'pirated'. The only difference between this stuff and anything you can get off a P2P network is that you've just paid a scammer $100 for the privilege of downloading it. When the jackbooted enforcers of Microsoft's Special Services Division kick in your door at 4am, telling them that all your software is 'legal' because you paid DS Team $69.95 for it is not going to help you.

Then there's all that spam offering you your choice of academic qualifications. Once again, you're paying the scammer for something worthless. If you go along to a job interview with your shiny new degree from a prestigious, non-accredited university, you're going to get laughed right out of the office. Employers are not going to be impressed by someone who tries to game them with a fake degree.

You've probably got some stock spam too. The scam here is that when you invest in whichever questionable smallcap is being pumped this week, the scammer sells their holding and walks away with your money.

What about mortgage spam? The terms and rates quoted bear no relation to the actual terms you would eventually get. Mortgage spammers are called 'lead generators'. They're simply taking names and addresses that they can resell to lenders.To get those names and addresses, they will tell you any lie that comes into their heads. At the end of the day, instead of the fabulous deal you were promised, you're just going to get calls from a few dozen lenders — some reputable, some dubious — offering you the same deal you could get anywhere else (plus lifetime membership on a suckers' list, of course).

By now, we've probably covered 90% of the junk in your inbox. The outright scams — money transfer scams, phishes, 419 letters and prize pitch scams probably bring it to more than 95%. What's left is mostly porn, and while you might argue that some of the porn providers may actually deliver something resembling a product (rather than simply ripping off your credit card), it's not much of a product. And if you really want porn, there are still plenty of places where you can get it for free.

Something that few people seem to realize is that spam isn't used to sell a range of differentiated products. To a close approximation, there is only one product that is sold by spam. The name of that product is fraud. The vast majority of spam — not 51%, not 70%, but probably more than 95% if not 99% — consists simply of one variant or another of either the short or the long con.

How do you spot the scams in your junk folder? Just open it up. There they are.