It still works. You don't need a lot of little old men buying knockoff Viagra or little old ladies looking for love to make a decent wage in a lot of countries

It still works. You don't need a lot of little old men buying knockoff Viagra or little old ladies looking for love to make a decent wage in a lot of countries. Also, you take for granted that everyone is benefiting from Google and Microsoft's SPAM filters attached to GMail and O365/Outlook. There are still a LOT of email addresses running on SMTP or even POP3. And a LOT of those email addresses are legacy addressses still in use by people that are rich targets for SPAM: old peopl using the addresses set for them in the 90's. A non-zero number of the messages that make it to your SPAM folder actually wind up in inboxes. Which inboxes? The ones that don't have good SPAM detection and, more importantly, are used by people that don't get a lot of email and may well be thirsting for connection. My parents practically dive over furniture during dinner to answer the phone just to see who it is. This behavior extends to inboxes for a lot of people. Sadly, better SPAM filter technology won't be the end of SPAM. SPAM will lose its efficacy when old, unfiltered inboxes stop being used. And they will stop being used when the (largely) older demographic stops using them as a result of the passing of time.