Slashdot Mirror
Spam Doesn't Work?
An anonymous reader writes "Businesses who believe the hype that spam works should read this article. It seems that the more recipients that you spam, the less likely they are to respond (startlingly obvious, but this seems to prove it)." Somehow I doubt this. If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred
pieces of it every morning? Someone is buying.
T.M.D.A.
/.ers are running qmail and managing your own email server, i wholeheartedly reccommend you investigate tmda. I enjoy checking my mail again.
It stands for tagged message delivery agent.
Read more here
Number of spam recieved since I installed it 3 weeks ago: None!
Go ahead, dmarien@dmarien.com spam the hell outta me. It wont get though! Sell my e-mail! Post it on any message board you want. I'm not gonna get any spam.
If any of you
dmarien
Altough this is an interesting topic, the qrite up and headline have nothing to do with the article.
The article talks about people ignoring questions from people that send the question to a group.
It refers to long 'cc' lists, and is intuitvely true. Any self-respecting spam is sent personally to me, and really professional spam has a forged 'from' header that is someone I know. (Maybe I can patent this concept. "Description of a Computerised Machine for the Convincement of Naive Buyers as to the Authenticity and Validity of Unrequested Commercial Messages".)
My blog
The point of the article was that the likelihood of getting a response was lessened if the person receiving the message knew that others were getting it. Really, the more someone feels as though they're getting personalized attention, the more likely they are to respond. When I have to ask several professors the same thing, for example, I'll email each one personally, rather than sending one mass email, since I want each one to feel as though I'm giving them personalized attention on the matter (a small example, to be sure, but I think it illustrates the point nicely.)
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
Somehow I doubt this. If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning? Someone is buying.
/dev/null ... it even makes getting spams fun.
:P
OK Taco... someone mentions this everytime you complain about spam, install Spamassassin and be done with it. No joke, over 5 spams a day to a spam maildir, where it sits for 2 days just in case it's legit, then promptly to
Hell, if you need help, fork over one of them slashdot.org email addresses and I'll help you for free.
Stupid Bitch. It's about sending an email with 4 people in the address line and sending the same thing with 1 person in the address line.
This article doesn't say anything about "spam doesn't work". The article says that people will likely ignore things with lots of people in the CC: block.
The clear moral has nothing to do with not utilizing junk e-mail. The moral is, if you're sending something to a bunch of people, use your mail client's "bcc" (blind carbon copy) header, not to: or cc:. This is a good idea for a variety of other reasons as well.
Moreover, the example they tested this with was not a commercial mailing. It was an informational query. People didn't respond because they assumed someone else would get it. Not buying the product listed in a commercial spam because "someone else will" does not make any sense. (Not that I know anyone who has ever bought ANYTHING, or even visited a website, based on a spam they recieved, but i digress.) If you want something relevant to spam, try spamming a bunch of people with one link using CC, then spamming a bunch of people with another link using BCC, and see which link gets more hits. You'll probably find that there's a psychological tendency to more like things that feel "personal". (But i think if there's a truism in the internet world today, it's that NO ONE likes spam..)
Silly taco.
No, what's easier is:
/etc/aliases
vi
down-arrow a few times
i
my-initials_website-domainname: my-main-email-address
ESC
: wq
And then supply that specific email alias to them. If they sell your email address, or spam you themselves, it's obvious who to get pissed-off with, and the alias can be easily delete for peace and quiet. This way, I never have to worry about telling everybody to update their addressbooks, nor do I have to worry that they might forget to.
Actually having 2 diffrent past employers experiment with it I can tell you first hand that is exactly correct.
The smaller lists are more likely to be a list of previous customers or otherwise targeted.
The larger lists on the other hand are likely to be spidered off websites and ripped from newspostings then minimally cleaned to find the easy to spot bad addresses.
The larger lists are also more likely to get people so pissed off about spam that they are likely to do something about it that involves a loss of resources on the spammer's side.
Someone who read the article -- will wonders never cease?
You're correct. The "researchers" in question sent out an e-mail to students, staff, etc., at the Technion technology institute (where they work), asking if the institute had a biology faculty. This is rather different from someone sending out an e-mail to 10,000 random addresses, offering... well, you know what they offer... and hoping for a bite from a small percentage.
The methodology utilized, the fact they were seeking information rather than selling something a la normal spam, etc., etc. -- I just don't think there's any way you can legitimately extrapolate this to apply to spam in the accepted sense of the word.
Doesn't seem to stop spam as far as I can see, only "hide it". So when you say 'Number of spam recieved' you really mean 'Number of spam read'?
Belief is the currency of delusion.
And if you absolutely must put the address on the web, make sure you encode it using something like Mailto Encrypter so that spambots will not catch it.
I have addresses posted on websites for months now which receive NO spam at all because they are encoded.
It is basically the same thing with a web interface.
I've been using it for a while and it's great. Only downside is that because you get hashval looking addresses, it's impossible to remember them (it can be annoying to have to look them up to login to a site).
While I have no real comment upon the article, besides the general "the conclusion doesn't fit the data"; I must protest the idea that people use spam because it WORKS. In general advertising May or May not work, there is no exact way to measure it. With SPAM and DIRECT MAILING there are ways of measuring responses, and these rates are SOOOOOOOO low that it is difficult to reach the conclusion that it WORKS. You may anger ( and therefore lose sales) more people than you attract. There is no hard evidence. People do not use SPAM because it works, but because it hasn't been proven to not work, which is not the same thing.
The research revolves around the number of visible email addresses in the To: (and I would imagine the Cc: headers). When people see a message sent to a bunch of others, they are less likely to respond.
Only the crudest spam include more than your email address, most don't even have that. email addresses are like gold to spammers and they don't give them away by revealing them in a large To: or Cc: header.
This is another example of the downfall of Slashdot. This article should never have reached the front page.
Brian
Remember Lexington Green!
This story from cockeyed.deadtrout.com is by a guy who wondered what the story behind all those "lose weight" and "earn $$,$$$ per month" signs were about. They are physical spam illegally nailed to posts everywhere.
Basically they're almost all by multi-level marketers of Herbalife, and apparently very few of them make ANY money, but they buy lots of signs and nail them everywhere.
And to buy in to the MLM costs money. The sample products cost money. The signs cost money. The nails cost money. The signs take time to deploy and then later revisit to see if they've been defaced or taken down by angry citizens. (Some people say defacing the sign discourages the posters more than removing the sign.)
spam costs very little to send. I know Herbalife isn't the only MLM out there.
I wonder how much spam is from MLM distributors who aren't making any decent money?
After reading that article I conclude that spam doesn't work, and that most of it is from desperate people trying futilely to make their dream MLM distributorship take off. Or maybe their half-baked business idea they came up with themselves or bought from someone else.
By the way, Cockeyed is a pretty cool website. That guy is nuts. He does pranks, sculptures and experiments on how much of something fits into something else and takes pictures and puts them on that site.