I would not call the random strings showing up in the general chan spam. I highly doubt it is profitable for whoever sent it. Industrial scale spam seems unlikely on Bitmessage.
I get it on some chans I run. I'm not talking about the annoying "test" message either, I'm telling you there is already actual spam.
And the only reason there isn't tons of it is because Bitmessage doesn't have the kind of user base that it's profitable to spam to.
It is much eaiser to spam Bitmessage on an industrial scale and profit than it is to do so against Gmail's anti-spam systems today. If Bitmessage had a hundred million users, then it would be profitable to spam there and it absolutely would happen a lot. In my opinion spam would quickly become the dominant form of traffic on the network, and the broadcast message feature would go the way of VRFY and open relays in SMTP.
