to me, the root cause of this is just money. a LOT of people have zero scruples when it comes to money, so they consider sending email to every email address t

to me, the root cause of this is just money. a LOT of people have zero scruples when it comes to money, so they consider sending email to every email address they can find, in order to hopefully make a sale, to be a perfectly valid tradeoff. these people deny that they are causing a problem, or that they ever caused a problem, because admitting that would mean they are a bad person, and they're not a bad person! they're "just trying to feed [their] kids, man." making decisions based on money alone is always a bad idea. ALWAYS. I do not care if it is one person and one decision, or if it is a business making a decision on behalf of their stock holders, or anything else. if money alone is your decision-making criteria, you are making a bad decision, or you are making a decision on bad criteria. someone always pays for everyone's scramble for money. someone always pays, and it is always an unjust payment. in this case, spammers have cost us our ability to self-host email, which is a very significant problem, as described by the author of the linked article, with rather severe consequences if you hope to have any freedom on the internet. so, if you work for a company that will, over time, do just about anything to get people to click on ads, you are slowly destroying the internet as it was intended to be, and was, for 2-4 decades, depending on how you define that.