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.

Comments

I have 4 Letters for you....

[dmarien]

T.M.D.A.

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 /.ers are running qmail and managing your own email server, i wholeheartedly reccommend you investigate tmda. I enjoy checking my mail again.

Headline is wrong.

[imta11]

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.

Re:Headline is wrong.

[Peyna]

Yeah, it doesn't say anything at all about anonymous e-mails to people soliciting goods and services. It's about writing a group of people you know asking for assistance with something, etc. Of course, I wonder if it would have the same effect if you simply used the BCC: line and wrote it so they thought they were the only person receiving. It isn't too difficult to send mail to a large group of people and make it appear that each person is the only receiving it. If they know other people got it, then yes, they're more than likely going to assume someone else will do it.

Do something about it Taco....

[reaper20]

Somehow I doubt this. If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning? Someone is buying.

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 /dev/null ... it even makes getting spams fun.

Hell, if you need help, fork over one of them slashdot.org email addresses and I'll help you for free. :P

Re:Obvious?

[gmack]

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.

Re:Faulty conclusion

[kiwimate]

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.

Re:Rules of not getting spammed.

[Jucius Maximus]

"1. Don't put your email address on the web."

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.