What will the next plan for spam be?

Short summary

AI-generated personalized emails now match human expert persuasion rates at commodity prices, creating a new spam era where authenticated, contextual messages from sales, recruiting, and procurement agents overwhelm inboxes. Traditional defenses filter identity but not consent. Spam historically follows economic cycles—the third collapse is LLM generation at fractions of a cent per message.

• •Personalized AI-generated emails match human expert phishing effectiveness at commodity prices
• •Authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) address identity but not the core consent problem
• •Spam follows economic cycles: three collapses from postal mail costs, to botnets, to now LLM generation

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.