"Everyone complains about the weather, but no one does a thing about it." So said Mark Twain. People also complain about spam but apparently they are indeed doing something. The wrong thing.

What they are doing is responding to spam e-mails and buying the products advertised, which of course means spam works and the spammers are encouraged to send more.

A survey from Endai Worldwide shows that over the past 12 months, 50 per cent of men and women have made a purchase as a result of opening a marketing e-mail solicitation.

"We were very surprised by the results of this study," said Michael Ferranti, CEO of Endai, an international online advertising and marketing firm in Manhattan. "It reinforces what we've believed at the gut-level all along, and that is that consumers will always be motivated to buy if the offer is appealing and customer-centric."

One wonders why Ferranti is so surprised. First, he's in advertising, but more importantly if spam didn't work it would have gone away a long time ago. And just in case you think he's anti-spam, he's not. In fact, Ferranti suggests marketing e-mail works so well that everyone should be doing it.

"A well-designed e-mail marketing campaign should be in every company's arsenal," Ferranti said. "If a firm has had any doubts, this study should prove its overall effectiveness." His company's press release goes on to state: when coupled with the relative low-cost of producing and distributing marketing e-mails (pennies on the dollar when compared to their snail-mail counterparts), online marketing is the most cost-effective way to market.

I started this blog entry with the intention of issuing an impassioned public plea: please stop buying stuff from spammers. If you don't, we'll only get more spam. So stop. Please.

But honestly, by the time I got to this point I had sort of lost heart. Ferranti is right: spam works, and no amount of blog protestations are going to stop people from buying stuff and thereby feeding the vicious cycle.

But I do have one suggestion: the rest of us -- the sane, I-would-never-buy-from-a-spammer-because-I-realize-how-stupid-it-is crowd -- will have to stop whining about our overflowing inboxes. It's not going to get better.

Peter Wolchak