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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.
What about the spam that doesn't have links in it?
Or for that matter has anyone ever looked at how much spam has broken links?
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The recipient of spam bears essentially ALL of the cost. Since the marginal cost of sending a spam is basically zero, it doesn't matter if the response percentage is low.
Spam will continue to be a worsening problem until some way is found to fix the fact that it doesn't cost the spammer anything.
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HTH
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I get very little spam these days, but then my mailserver has a blocked senders list that is now over 1,000 lines long. That I find to be the most effective method to stop unwanted mail. Today I started blocking SMTP server IPs as well. I check my logfile every morning and check who was bounced in the previous 24 hours. I haven't yet seen an email bounce that I think might have been legit.
In other words, if you want to block spam for your users, it requires a bit of time each day. I calculate it is time well spent as it saves staff from being snowed under by the stuff, and saves me from getting multiple emails from staff who all want to know how an email offering them a low cost penis extension made it into their inbox.
Spam isn't going away. Either you tollerate it or take action to stop it getting into your inbox. Of course it'd help if a few ISP's - today's culprit has been swbell - actually took action against their DSL users spamming of their broadband connection. Why don't they share information of folk they have had to disconnect due to breeching their AUP - if it suddenly became difficult to get any internet access, spamming might become more hassle than it's worth.
1. Don't put your email address on the web.
2. Don't pick a name that will be targeted by a dictionary or brute force spam attack:
e.g. "ggh@hotmail" will get spammed.
"lovetocook@hotmail" will get spammed.
"arh6yypolk11j@hotmail" will not get spammed. (well, it will now that it's on Slashdot)
As an experiment, I created a test email address at hotmail that was 20 random characters long. Every once in a while I would send it emails, or send emails from it to myself just to keep it alive.
Never once in several months did I receive any spam.
-... ---
The lesson you'd take away, if you were an advertizing skunk, is to address things specifically to individuals as much as is possible. Advertisers know that, which is why they spend money on mailing lists and attempt to make everything look like it's personally addressed to the recipient. Next time you win the sweepstakes, Name of Addressee, you'll see that.
But spam? That's different. (Or did they have "Sarah Feldman" ask how she could date more women?)
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That's not doing something about the problem. That's hiding the problem. Some of us are not interested in hiding the problem since it solves nothing.
The people that don't want the spam are already doing their part by not buying from spammers and getting their connections shut off when possible. Spamassassin and the like won't help towards that goal - you think a spammer cares at all if they're not heard by those who won't buy from them anyways?
How is this obvious at all, or even correct? The people you spam have no knowledge of how many others get spammed by the same person/company.
;-)
100% Ack. Very often I get spam mails to an address like "info" and my address has been included in the "bcc:" field, preventing me from seeing how many others have got the same mail.
But in my case, the theory is valid: the more spam mails I get, the less likely I read them to determine if there is actually something useful among them. I just mark all mails, deselect my personal friends and hit "Delete"... Well if there was a reminder mail of my library... sorry guys...
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The article has nothing to do with spam. It talks about emailing questions.
This is about the fifth time this has happened recently and I'm starting to become concerned about the quality of the journalists here.
Of course spam works. I'm not a spammer myself, but obviously it works, or it wouldn't be done by the same people over and over.
-B
here's what i think... you need to remember that the internet explosion made it very easy for every tom dick an harry to start a porn site and subsequently start raking in the dough. these guys aren't business men, they're essentially farmers wearing tuxedos who threw their money in the air and danced a jig while it falls on their shoulders. when the whole thing started to slow down (and it has!) they didn't necessarily have the business sense to adapt to the new market so they kept doing what they always did. by hook or by crook. spam may have worked once and the adult webmaster involved might have seen one signup in every 10,000 emails that went out. so the numbers dropped to 1 in every 100,000 - what do you do? send 10 times more spam. smart, huh? i don't do it with my site (nameless but strong) because i think there are much better ways to spend my promotional resources. high and mighty? no, still in business. gub
I'm in the process of building in a visual-tagging-only whitelist for my personal homebrew webmail sysytem, msgs from people I've ever mailed and/or with subjects I've written with are marked "likely not spam".
I wouldn't mind sending the rejects to a secondary filter, and then having it send the non-spam ones back to a special address I can pull together...so who offers a service like that?
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Sure, unless I'm also running it. Then, we can't talk to each other because our polite automated replies won't be read.
Spam is what economicists call an external diseconomy. Simply speaking, it's a resource that general society pays for, not the business. Since the business views the resource as being low or no cost, it will use the resource as much as possible, disregarding the fact that it is costing internet users everywhere.
These are exactly the forces that cause industrial pollution. It costs businesses little or nothing to dump their waste products in local lakes; society as a whole pays for the degradation of the environment.
When you have an external diseconomy, the only way to restrain businesses from taking advantage is to change the cost structure - make businesses pay the true cost of spam through internet rate changes, or enact legislation to make it illegal (the later is the strategy used to control pollution).
An interesting observation about spam was made a few years ago by either Dylan Tweeny or Robert Sideman (I forget who):
Spam doesn't actually have to work. It only has to give the APPEARANCE that it works.
The real money in the spam business comes not from spamming itself but from selling spam services -- mailing lists, distro services, and so on -- to (if you'll pardon the stock market analogy) greater fools.
If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning?
Spam works simply because the marginal cost of 1 additional email is so low that the marginal gain of 1 additional email sent will ALWAYS be greater.
For example....
Suppose I do television advertising. As I buy more and more advertising, I come closer and closer to saturating my potential market with exposure to my advertisement. Say I'm buying advertisements during sitcoms. For each add I buy, I reach fewer people who have yet to be exposed to my advertisement than the last ad that I ran. Thus the marginal value of each ad I purchase goes down, while the cost remains equal (all other factors equal).
That means that eventually I will reach a point where the marginal cost of the ad is greater than the marginal value. At that point, I'll start losing money on the campaign, and quit running the ad.
Now, let's look at spam....
Each exposure still costs some finite amount of money. The difference is that the cost is TINY compared with television advertising. Suppose I spend $1,000 on a co-located server and the associated bandwidth (a totally arbitrary number). That server can probably send literally millions (if not billions) of emails in the month that my $1,000 paid for. It's obvious that the marginal cost of the spam campaign is TINY compared to the marginal cost of the television ad campaign.
That means that the spam campaign takes MUCH MUCH longer. Indeed, as the marginal cost of the spamming approaches zero (which it gets very close to), the number of mails it takes to reach the point where marginal cost = marginal value approaches infiniti (which means you won't ever stop sending mail).
It's simple economics. The only way to lessen spam (from a purely free-market standpoint) would be to increase the marginal cost of the email (or decrease the marginal value, but that's not going to happen, because there's always an idiot out there that can be scammed into sending you a $5 check). Increasing the marginal cost of the email could be done in lots of ways - but they mostly all involve giving up some of the freedoms which we're probably not willing to give up in exchange for freedom from some spam.
After a stint of sleeplessness last week I was starting to wonder if some of the spam actually comes through multi level marketing scams. Some of the pitches on late night TV (make $3000 a month on your computer) sound a lot like whoever falls for them is stuck putting up web pages or sending email about Herbal Viagra etc.
There seem to be some somewhat legitimate businesses that seem to have fallen for list sellers, but 99,999% of the spam I get seems to deal with totally screwball products and services.
Does anyone have an idea if MLM has discovered spam or is it really just some groups or companies that send this stuff under hundreds of different names?
We had a similar experience at my current employer. These guys in Florida called "DM Buyers" offered us 100,000 opt-in email addresses. We sent out 4 emails through them, going to 25,000 addresses each. Our click through for all 100,000 was less than 200. Later we determined, unfortunately, that DM Buyers was NOT using strictly opt-in addresses (when we were reported to spam cop).
More recently, we sent an email to people who requested it from our website, and our past customers. The site has been around for about 3 years, so we had a total of 11,500 addresses. We had 1000 bounces, 175 unsubscribes, 417 click throughs. Of the click throughs, we had 11 sales totalling $2200, which for a small business is pretty good for the ~$0 of sending out such a message.
Basically we learned that one should never, ever, ever trust anybody selling email addresses. Especially not these sleazebags.
The more bombs you drop, the more likely you are to hit something. Sure, they're unguided, but they are inexpensive and there are lots and lots and lots of them. This is especially true on the net. People are biting. They're the same people who scout the papers for coupons and better deals. Not every piece of spam is a penile enlargement ad. Granted, I dump spam as soon as I get it, but it'd be naive to think there aren't at least some good deals out there, and there are people actively searching for those deals. I have to agree CmdrTaco... Somebody is buying. It just isn't you.
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I have a friend in mainland China I communicate a lot with. I send him the spam and he then tracks them dowm for me. He'll contact the chinese company that sends me the spam, and has tracked down the people that sends them the list with MY email on it. I've not only been able to remove myself from at least 6 spammers lists, but I also demand (AND GET) an apology letter from them.
Chinese people are very polite, and if you approach them on their OWN terms (In chinese of course), they will most often comply.