This week on TechStuff, your plucky hosts talked about the evils of spam and the amazing accomplishment of publishing 100 episodes without going bonkers.

Monday’s episode was all about spam mail. Chris and I reveal our love of Monty Python as well as our hatred for junk mail. We also talk about the staggering statistics of spam mail and how it can account for the vast majority of all e-mail traffic across a network. In fact, a report from Symantec says that 90.4 percent of all e-mail on corporate networks last year was unsolicited.

Christopher (a listener, not Pollette) wrote in to TechStuff and asked how spammers make money. After all, if there were no money in sending spam, we wouldn’t be plagued by the darn stuff. In general, spammers make money by selling lists of potential customers to clients. Spammers have to collect valid e-mail addresses, sell those lists to clients and then carpet bomb the list with messages about herbal enhancement drugs, refinancing schemes or whatever else the client wants.

There are a few other ways to make money spamming. If you’re running your own business and sending out spam, you may make money whenever someone responds to the spam and purchases a product. Some companies will pay you a tiny hourly sum to have a program running on your computer that sends spam mail out to other people. Essentially, you’re hiring your computer out as a bot or zombie. But the payout is very low and sending spam can get you in trouble with the law.

Then there are the e-mail scams. Usually, a scammer is his or her own spammer. The scammer will send out hundreds of thousands of e-mails hoping for a few bites. Each attempt may only land one or two opportunities, but the payoff of scams tends to be pretty high — people have lost thousands of dollars in scams.

But enough about the seedy underworld of the Internet. On Wednesday, Chris and I celebrated our 100th episode of TechStuff. We shared stories about ourselves and the tech we use as consumers. We also shared a special song written by James Meyer, host of The Rare Podcast. At the end of the episode, I make an embarrassment out of myself (more so than usual) by attempting to deliver a trucker soliloquy sent to us by genuine trucker (and awesome listener) Humble Floyd.

On a related note, after receiving an e-mail from a listener who desperately wants me to change the way I say listener mail, I opened up the debate on Twitter. So far I have one very passionate vote to change my lead-in to the segment, six votes to keep it the way it is, one vote to keep my lead-in but to get rid of the sound effect and an e-mail alerting me that a distant relation needs me to help smuggle a huge sum of cash out of Nigeria. That last one might be spam.

We look forward to bringing you many more episodes of TechStuff. We even received our first Spenserian sonnet from a listener, which we’ll feature in an upcoming listener mail segment.

Learn more about spam, zombies and podcasts at HowStuffWorks.com:

How Spam Works
How Zombie Computers Work
How Zombies Work
How Podcasting Works