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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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Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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.
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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?
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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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).
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?
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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