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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.
My penis is 12" long, and I have never run out of laser toner. Surely this proves it!?
My blog
The study was about asking informational questions, not about hawking products to the masses. The "bystander effect" doesn't apply here.
for every 10,000 pieces of spam mail sent
at least 1 gets a 'buyer'
so the more spam sent the more buying happens..
simple logic
--Huck
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
the more recipients that you spam, the less likely they are to respond (startlingly obvious
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. Although your odds of getting a bite have to be ridiculously low, they most certainly have to go up with every mailbox you hit. Basic statistics!
Mark
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
I'm gonna put my email down here... maxcohen@meditech.com and find out how quickly spammers harvest it. I just hope it doesn't get modded down as offtopic so they never see this. anyway... The people who are buying aren't the people getting the spam. It's the people who keep hiring these goons to send it. The more people they have on their e-mailing lists, the better their marketing pitch: "we have 100 million live, tested emails, etc. etc." With this, they convince people to pay them to mail us. Everyone's getting scammed.
...just one buyer out of 1'000 spammed (nay, make that even 100'000) will still feed the bastards. And hence make spam an attractive option.
-- Serge K. Keller
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.
Concealed Handgun License Courses in Plano, Texas
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.
Somehow I doubt this. If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning? Someone is buying.
Because of risk v. return. Sending spam once you have an internet connection is for all intents and purposes free. Until you can prove it actually hurts the previous revenue stream, there is no reason not to spam.
Consider it this way, if I send 10,000 peices of spam, and log on for free, I need one response to make a profit. If I don't even bother with ethics, and instead compile a list of people who respond (auto responders count), people who try and unsubscribe, and people who flame back, then I sell those names, I make a killing.
Just like used car salesmen, real estate agents, and lawyers I don't need anything valuable to sell, I only need a few suckers.*
* Obviously, a gross generalization. I appologize for comparing real estate agents to lawyers.
Never confuse volume with power.
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.
Consider what it takes for a spammer to send out his junk: A cheap computer with a modem ($200) and a dial-up connection ($20), so about $220. If the spammer is selling something at $20, all he needs is 11 people to buy to break even. If you take out the cost of a computer, all he has to make is one sale to break even. When the spammer send out 10,000,000 spams, if only 0.0000012 of those people buy his junk, he has made his 12 sales and thus made a profit.
Michael Loves Me!
http://pyzor.sourceforge.net/
HTH
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I just can't wait until spammers can figure out how to put ads in their ads, we will get emails with those damn flash appelets advertising for KY or something.
Create a better spam , get a better filter
...any statistics on how 'successful' spam is in getting people to click-through to a website, or actually buy a product, etc... but in this case, won't spammers who read the article simply start BCCing everyone, if they're not already? Not that it will matter: people are either learning how to recognize spam for its content, or using blockers to send it to the trash...
"For every right, an equal responsibility..."
Somehow I doubt this. If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning?
It depends. If spam is your only method of advertising and/or you're running a scam then spam won't hurt your buisness. On the other hand "legitimate" buisnesses who send spam are probably thinking that more publicity is better and are under the impression that spam sent is really helping them.
I stole this Sig
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
At least one powerful industry group is lobbying against anti-spam laws, so I guess it must work for them:
This space left intentionally blank.
This article is saying that if you want "results" out of your emails (whether you're a company or otherwise) you should email people individually instead of sending the same message to everybody in your address book.
Right, now midgetgangbangingmagazine.com's executive in charge of email can type me a message himself saying how great his 100% free trial membership website is. I feel so loved.
$ make love
make: don't know how to make love. Stop
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.
But it doesn't have to be a lot of people doing so. Given how many they can send to, it only has to be a few percentages buying the products or services. Spam is a cheap way to advertise, that is why they can keep doing it again and again even if few people buy the stuff. The cost of advertisement is spread out on everyone who has to pass it on or who recieves it.
Will work for bandwidth
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.
That "experiment" was rather useless, first they used a woman as the From person, the lonely computer geeks immediatly saw "fresh meat" printed all accross the email, so they wanted to be helpful but also help themselves. Next, the email required the person to actually respond. How many of us have actually recevied spam that wants to "talk" with us? Other than ofcourse the African millionare that wants to use your bank account to extract money out of the contry.
In conclusion this article proves nothing, and the fact that spam is on the rise proves 1 of 2 things. Merchants investing on spam are idiots or people buying products that see adverstise on spam are idiots.
Useless sig.
The paper does not show that spam does not work. It just proves that when sending spammail you should only put 1 person into the to section. And the fact that the virtual girl got responses from such a high percentage of recipients might be a hint that spammers should always use female names in reply to addresses.
Googlefight "Slashdot Troll" against "BSD is dying" 303:229. BSD thus cant die.
Sure, return rates were really low for mass-mailed messages, but the fact is there were returns. Considering the low start up costs for spamming, the fact that you can expect SOME return justifies the effort. Of course, the article really isn't applicable to commercial spam. I would be more willing to respond to a stupid question of a kid looking for a biology department than low mortgage rates, herbal Viagra or Britney's latest explicit video.
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.
Any type of computer based advertising has a high annoyance factor. Most of us grew up with ad-less computers, so why should we submit to it now? In contrast, most TV has always been a advertising vehicle, so we don't mind as much when we get hit with TV ads.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
This article is talking about a different kind of spam - That more innocuous kind where someone asks if for an altruistic act on your part. The idea is that if you ask alot of people for help, and they all know you are asking alot of people, a higher percentage will shrug it off in the expectation that you'll get the help somewhere else.
On the other hand, "Do this for yourself!" spam would seem to fall into a whole different category. It's no longer a matter of letting the responsibility for following through fall on someone else, because the act is completely selfish. If you don't do it, *you* don't recieve the "benefits". The study doesn't really address this kind of spam at all.
-Andrew
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.
-... ---
Spamming people also drives some away as potential customers. Perhaps not for nameless spammers that I would never purchase from, but when larger companies do things, they lose my business.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
1. The research only says that people are less like to respond if the to field contains multiple names. A lot of spam is targetted at only one person.
2. The research only says that people are less like to respond if the to field contains multiple names. It does not say that they are less likely to read it.
3. If you're targetting 30 people a go, and only 3 respond, then your'e still getting a better response than if one person was targetted and that person responded.
The irony with spam I think is that the less Spam in the system, the more effective it is. So - if people manage to block 90% of spam, then the 10% that gets through works better, and the spammers can afford to try a little harder to get that spam through.
Like a sort of a feedback loop sort of thing.
Training monkeys for world domination since 1439
If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning? Cause you are hungry and it beats cat food?
Hmmm. Getting new email addresses is a pain in the kiester. Why not try something like SpamAssassin instead? I still get a few spam to my inbox, but the other 40-50/day go straight to the trash. I have a few domains, and I sometimes use customized email addresses, but it still all funnels through SA. I've been very pleased. What I need to do is figure out if it's been updated to catch Klez. That one always gets through and is very annoying.
I do not have a signature
The article's conclusion is painfully obvious and anyone who didn't realize that already shouldn't be sending email...it also has nothing to do with spam, since spam never has multiple people on copy. All the spam I've ever got is BCC'd to me, or TO/CC'd to just me.
Spam is a lot like advertising. Is money made with spam? Are people's lives improved with spam? It is likely that nobody gets ahead with this type of advertising and it would be difficult to impirically prove one way or another. However, that isn't the point. By looking at the amount of spam in general, you can say that the people who sell spam solutions (lists, software, etc.) are very successful. They have convinced the spammers that this is effective.
In essense, that is all that is necessary for spam to exist and flourish is for people to effectively market it to the people who use it, the spammers. This is similar to internet advertising in general and in some ways to the world at large.
Gotta love this line:
:-P
Some just tried chatting "her" up with some very personal questions.
I guess even if it is a person you don't know, and you are a single male. Anyone is a potential partner.
In a way, it kinda proves a that porn spam is effective when people try to chat someone up who isn't even being suggestive.
~ kjrose
Seems like everyone is hitting on this...
the more recipients that you spam, the less likely they are to respond
Well, statistically, its wrong. The more you hit, the more return your going to get. Of course, what I think he was trying to say, was that the more you spam a single person, the less likely they are to respond to each subsequent hit.
Sure one or two emails directed into your interests might be cool, and may get you to buy stuff (personally, i kinda like reading the new stuff from the think geek op in stuff... but if its op in, it isn't spam? ), but then you get into tens or even hundreds of emails that people don't even look at, delete based on sender, or filter all together and boom, there goes your return rate for the spam.
In this case, less is more for the individual. However, more is still more for how many individuals you are going to 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?)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
The message they sent was asking the recipiant to do something for someone else, to make an effort for no return.
The vast majority of, if not all, spam is offering something to the recipiant. Whether its a good deal on long distance phone calls, the ability to make money fast or unlimited pr0n in your inbox they are all offering a reward for whatever effort the recipient has to make. Human nature dictates that this is going to generate a much higher percentage of returns. We all want something for nothing, or as near to nothing as we think we can get away with.
How could you editors? I am so disappointed now!
-- Note: These Comments are Generated by ME! Not You! ME!
If you haven't read the article yet, it's not about commercial spam at all, but the psychological effects of getting an email asking a question from someone you know, with more names in the cc: field resulting in more of a "someone else will answer it" effect.
It really has nothing to do with commercial spam, and the original post here did nothing to make that distinction.
Can we find this person, and "educate" them?
I've got a 2x4 with a nail in one end...
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
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...
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
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
Until a recent /. thread, I didn't realize there was such a tool as Fetchmail. This makes it exceedingly easy to use SpamAssassin.
I thought that since I didn't own/administer the mail server for my address that I couldn't get spamassassin installed or even use it in any way. But if you use Fetchmail on your OWN box, it pops/sends from your pop account on the remote machine to your address on the local machine, where you can use all the spamassassin & procmail stuff you want.
I didn't think that I could ever get SpamAssassin working for me, but after getting fetchmail working and a few Perl module installs later, SpamAssassin is tagging those nasty spams for easy filtering. It's great
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
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.
You are absolutely correct. If I post a reply without reading the article, I shouldn't cry if I get flamed. But to post an article without even reading it? Now thats insane.
I have 2 gripes with this news:
1. This ain't about spam. It's about emailing people for information. I'm willing to bet lots of people aren't going to read the article and will just pump out knee-jerk responses about UCE in general.
2. The theory being talked about in the article is already widely known in psychology. I forget the exact term for it, but in real life it's the same. If you got injured in a crowd of people, the chances are less that you'll get someone to call 911 than if there were only a couple of people on the street. In a crowd everybody just thinks someone else will or have already called the paramedics.
So basically, this is nothing new.
eTrade SUCKS
I use a unique name for everything I need to hand an email address to.. ie.. microsoft@mydomain.com would be the email address i give to microsoft.. that way.. not only will i kill the address if it starts getting spammed, I know who sold me up the river.
Don't Tread on Me
Email Subject Header: DAVID! INCREASE YOUR BREAST SIZE NOW!
No....this is not a joke, I have received 3 emails like this in the past month.
Please, people, READ THE ARTICLE !
The article does NOT claim that "Spam doesn't work". The experimenters sent out LEGITIMATE questions by email to people. Some of these recipients saw (from, presumably, the To: header) only their name as a recipient. Others saw that 4 others had also received the same query. The result was that people who knew that others had been asked the same question were less likely to respond than people who were listed as the sole recipient. The result that people are less likely to act if they know others are also in a position to act is a well known result in social psychology called "diffusion of responsibility".
They did NOT find what was previously implied, i.e. that sending an email to more recipients reduces response rate.
THEY DID NOT FIND THAT "Spam doesn't work".
This article only takes into account the physology of someone receiving an email. If the reader sees that the email is addressed to many, many people, then they are less likely to take action because of the email. If they are see that the email is only addressed to themselves, then they are more likely to take action.
Pretty accurate. Seeing multiple addressee (especially of people I don't know) for new mail in mail box is a pretty sure sign that the email was spam, and it gets deleted right away. However, if I see it was only to me, then it MAY get some attention (until I realize it is spam).
As long as the cost of sending spam is less than the money they make from it, spam will keep comming. And sending spam is pretty cheap, so it will be here for a long time.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
If we change "Nobody's buying" to "virtually nobody's buying" the situation becomes clearer. Statistically speaking, the two statements are the same. But even a statistically insignificant response can make a spam campaign profitable. That's because there's no per-message cost. Or at least, none for the sender!
Our email system was designed on the assumption voluntary self-restraint was all that it took to prevent abuse of the network. That assumption hasn't been true ever since the Internet outgrew its academic/research roots. We need a simple way to make people accountable for the network resources they consume. That's a big issue in all Internet apps, but it's particulary true for email. Until we tackle this issue, spam will continue to be a problem.
yea, sure... I'll use a 20 character random name as my email address--that'll make it really easy for the people that I WANT to get email from...
From the dramtic-but-completely-misleading-title dept.
jello.
aka aron.
The article was based on a person requesting information, more of a "help me" type message. The feeling that someone else will help is understandable in this case. It doesn't apply to sales requests, "Buy this thingy now!", because they are assumed to be impersonal with the response being based on the recipient's desires only. People respond to ads on TV and it is safe to say that they are pretty impersonal.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
I suspect the money comes from companies suckered into buying the e-mail lists.
:) The notion that you can send out millions of e-mail and you just HAVE to get some response from that volume must appeal to a lot of people.
There are still iterations of the pyramid schemes going around, and the Nigerian money laundering thing, and the lotteries for that matter.
The beauty of the free market is obvious in this case. If people don't read the spam, if money never flows to spammers, then they get weeded out and will simply cease to exist. As it stands now, there is lots of money to be made in spam, and our advertising-swallowing culture gobbles it up. Just don't buy, and watch as they die.
The Netherlands has just been declared Spam Heaven. As recently abfab won the appeal it made on the case they lost from XS4ALL concerning spam.
Initially XS4ALL won the case with a sum of 50EUR to each spammail a client of XS4ALL would receive from abfab. Abfab appealed and WON this time.
This is bad news, i'm not sure what my mailbox will get in the near future.
Luckily all kinds of actions against abfab have been started. For example http://www.dsinet.org/?did=1116 (dutch)
-- Cliff Albert
so the more spam sent the more buying happens.. simple logic"
Hypothesis: A sucker is born every minute.
OK, so scale that up to the population of the earth: Send out 6x10^9 spams. How many responses do you get?
6x10^9 / 10^4 = 600000
Thus by this scaling, there are 6x10^6 suckers on earth.
Now how many minutes are there in a year? 365 d/year* 24 h/day * 60 min/h = 525600 minutes/year
5.26 x 10^6 == (approx) 6 x 10^6
Thus the number of suckers on the planet Earth == (approx) the number of minutes in a year!
Conclusion: A sucker is born every minute! (give or take a few)
--- Q.E.D. !!!! --- (Thank you spam research!)
I have a hard time believing that many people WOULD respond favorably to spam. I always joke that everyday spammers call me poor, fat, bald and underendowed and expect me to buy their products. Those aren't the most annoying though. Why in the hell do I get mortgage and loan offers in the spambox? IS there ANYBODY out there who is really stupid enough to trust something as important as their mortgage to a company that goes out of their way to hide thier identity?
This article is completely irrelevant to spam. It's essentially a study in Diffusion of Responsibility and related, well-known psychological phenomena.
Yes, it's quite relevant, and suggests the 'net may extend well known psychological phenomena to unforseen degrees. But as for spam, it doesn't tell us a thing.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
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
There's an informative piece about spam in this week's Onion: http://www.theonion.com/onion3825/anti-spam_legisl ation.html
Yet they haven't gone away yet either.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Geee... i woulda thought that the onion's center for the study of the obvious would have published this one.
I worked for a company that started buying "opt-in" mailing lists as a last ditch effort. As the sys admin, I was against using this list and made every effort to avoid sending these emails.
Our execs, decided to outsource the emails. When I started giving them sh*t for the SPAM-vertising complaints we were getting from our Colo provider, there response was: "We have gotten # responses, it works, and we need the customers."
This blew me away. I had always wondered why spammers kept spamming. I could never imagine that they actually got responses. So how do we stop it? It's not as easy as just ignoring them. First, that won't happen. Someone will always need toner, and even if you can get the word out to everyone, they won't listen. Second, it has proven to work, and it is so cheap that they won't stop trying. The only way to stop it is to make it cost prohibitive. Doing that is a mystery to me. Fines? Taxes?
The most annoying SPAM is the one offering you a list of emails for spamming because it's that a-hole who is selling your address.
-- My HARDWARE, My CHOICE.
First of all, as was already mentioned, the article doesn't really deal with actual spam (where someone sends out a bazillion (tech. term) emails to people they don't know to try and find that one bozo who has not the internet sense god gave a script kiddie who will buy their worthless product.
The second issue would be the fact that their statistics in the article are invalid (I think, not that I am any sort of stats major.) If their sample WAS good, they didn't show it in the article, as they didn't tell how many of the people received an email with mutliple recipients vs how many received one with just their email message.
The logic that spam must work if it's continuing is the same as saying that the dot-coms were bound to succeed or else the VCs wouldn't keep investing. Sometimes people do stupid things. And, as others have mentioned, spam is probably the cheapest form of advertising available today (for the advertiser). No, I don't know who buys penis pills or badly-remanufactured laser printer cartridges either. Even if nobody does, these spammers don't have any business incentive to stop.
1/10th of a percent success means failure just about everywhere but spam. 1/10th of a percent of 1 million is still 1000. Would even seem 1/100th of a percent success is still success in the spam world. That's 100 customers for a few bucks in adverstising. Basically you can't lose.
Until that changes spam will just get worse and worse.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
If a business conducts its own mailings, it will quickly find out that spam doesn't work and change its approach. Well, maybe not quickly, but they'll eventually get the idea that it's costing them both money and sales. But if a buisiness outsources its mass email campaign to an unscrupulous spammer who's more than happy to take their money, they'll probably keep right on spamming. The spammers will probably even show their clients numbers that show the "incredible" success that their other customers have had with the same plan.
Suits are dumb; just show them a upward trending graph with a big pie chart, say a bunch of catchy words that don't mean anything but sound good, and they'll buy anything.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
TV ads are for the most part enjoyable. People even watch the superbowl not for the football.. but for the comercials. On the web.. ads are only anoying, when was the last time you saw a pop up you liked?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you send a question to a bunch of people you know, they will each assume that the other will answer.
Spam does not work this way.
All your favorite sites in one place!
Really, how many people buy the penis-pills, the stamina enhancers, the get-rich-quick schemes? I've known one person who bout one of the get rich quick kits, it was a big book, with all these grants, the odds of getting any grant were about 1 and 270 million.
--fetch daddy's blue fright wig, i must be handsome when i release my rage
"If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning? Someone is buying."
That's simple, alot of small business owners are stupid and they buy lists. that's who's buying
First of all there is the annoyance factor. Today I recieved 7 messages from 7 different addresses and they all had the same thing. A picture of a naked woman...the same woman in all 7 messages. Since I never know who is going to be in my house at any given time this is not appropiate.
I do not own my own house and therefore I do not need a second mortgage, nor do I have the ability to sell my non-existant house.
As a guy I'm quite sure that I do not need to enhance my bust size nor does my girlfriend need her penis enlarged.
Spam does not work because there is no targeting involved. People who spam equate thier advertising tricks with TV ads...this is very wrong. Notice with TV ads that there is some thought as to who watches a show at any given time and the ads reflect this. You'll find Supermarket and Food ads near mealtimes, you see car ads when the 30-40 year old people watch, Toys during cartoon or cartoon specials. They target and they work. Spam does not.
Also with TV ads there is a way of getting the product. Car Dealerships give addresses and phone numbers. A Supermarket will tell show you a map. A Toy company will tell you to go to a toy store of your choice. Spam in way of contrast leaves you with no way of contacting the person who sent it as the mailer account changes each time it sends out a batch, and the webpages are often not a listed URL, but nothing more than an IP address...no consumer confidence from me at those pages.
The only thing that Spam sells consistantly is products to ease the symptoms of stress that comes from getting 50 of the [censored]ing things a day.
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
... so long as you're the one selling the email addresses to these suckers selling laser supplies, penis enlargements, or those Princes from South Africa with millions of dollars. Maybe we should track down the people selling the addresses and bombard them with traffic for once. We can use the slashdot effect to give these people a test of their own medicine.
The article and the study it covers have nothing to do with commercial spam. The researches sent mails to people, in the name of a fake student, asking them a question, then analyzing the replies they got.
Their conclusion is NOT that spam does not work, but that if you are a person that wants to ask a group of people a question, you'll get the most replies if you send each of them a different message, instead of putting everyone in the "To:" field of the same message.
Sometimes, you really do have to read the article body, rather than its title.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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).
Okay the article, as everyone who can click and can read knows, is not truly about spam. The article can very very very very loosely be associated to spam, by a very thin thread.
However, the headline here is right and here is why we need to get more discussion on this topic.
Spam doesn't work. Here's why:
1) Spam thankfully now has a bad reputation. Its something to be ignored and not read. Entire emails are lost in the internet void thanks to spam filters. Most of it isn't getting through. And most of the topics nowadays are for things most people don't want and don't see in snail mail fliers because they are considered taboo or untrustworthy. Penis or breast enlargement is not a common service you'll find in your weekly grocery store mailer.
2) Here's the loose thread you can associate to this article. As with any email, even legitimate emails, they can be very easily IGNORED. I get offers from my credit card companies every so often because I've signed up for online statements and online account management to save paper. They haven't sent me many paper mailers lately. They even started to send me those telemarketing offers in email rather than have someone call me up.
However, I can ignore emails a lot easier than telemarketing. Telemarketing puts a person on the spot and gives a little pressure, while email is received privately with very little bells or whistles. It can even electronically be blocked if the user so desires.
The only reason why things like spam continue to exist is because spam is virtually free to the spammer, especially if they are using quasi legal or illegal methods to send you emails. If just a few people bite on the emails, then they've made money.
Yes there are hardware costs but thats mostly cheap, and they probably obtain bandwidth illegally to send the spams.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
240 recipients? 36% versus 50%?
Have these people ever heard of statistics? What they did is basically worthless - if they sampled ten times more email addresses (randomly chosen or manually and evenly distributed between sexes, ages, etc.) they could start thinking about publishing their results. But this is a joke.
The number one reason...that Slashdot needs an "Obvious" Tag.
Two reasons: it's amazingly cheap per item -- direct mail costs up to $5 per item, "carrier-route" main in the neighborhood of 50 cents an item, spam approaches free; and the spam-mailing companies lie about the effectiveness to unsophisticated users -- obviously unsophisticated, since sophisticated users know that spammers are a plague, anathema, and a hissing throughout the land.
It works on the throw-mud-at-wall principle, which is precisely why you get so much of it. Sure, the percentage might go down as you throw more mud, but strictly from a sales perspective, I'd rather have 1% of 2,000,000 than 2% of 500,000.
My
Limekiller
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If I spammed everyone in the world I'd expect to have the most results not fewer results.
If TV ads did work there would not be such a drive to develop new advertising gimmicks such as the 'pop-up' ads beind devised for network television. When people can afford things and they want specific items, they research and buy them. I am truly of the opinion that even those lacking the most basic common sense are learning to become smart consumers; and advertising cannot attract the attention of smart, cost- (and yes maybe even brand-) conscious consumers.
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
Since they have proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that 1 sucker = 1 minute, then the question of which is irrelevant.
I make the account for each one manually. My mailserver is not set to accept all incoming email.
Don't Tread on Me
Actually, recently a Daily Show report said that the rate at which suckers are born is slowing. It is expected to reach one sucker ever 2.5 minutes in 2005. The highest rate in which suckers were born was during the babyboom, when something close to a sucker every 18 seconds.
But the in-depth reporting done by the Daily Show did conver this within the last couple weeks, and the number isn't one sucker each minute.
=)
Do you Gentoo!?
The thing about spam is, it doesn't have to result in sales. All it has to do is fuel someone's dream. There is a market for dream fuel, and it only has to work in your dreams.
And ironically enough, it doesn't taste good either.
my last sig was too controversial... now, a new and improved useless sig!
You get spam because some guillible guy in marketing buys the ability to spam from an "Intenet Marketting Guru". The poor marketing guy is convinced that even a 0.1% is likely and will be profitable.
It's not us who gets suckered into buying the crappy product that doesn't work, it's them.
the very fact that I've been bcc'd leads me to believe other people have received the same message, and I'm less likely to reply.
Seeing a "To:" is important.
I don't have any proof of that, so I cannot believe it.
I do have proof that people THINK it works, so I get a lot of spam. I do have proof that there are people with a vested interest in promoting the idea that spam works; the people who sell spam tools. I have heard the argument that "if only one out of 100,000 people buys, it works", but I always counteract that with, "if only one out of 100,000 people is pissed enough at the spam to seek revenge or even just waste enough of the spammers time, it ceases to make money."
What I firmly believe is that the only people making money off of spam are the spam service sellers; I think the spam service sellers lie and say lots of people are making money off of spam. I think this is enough to ensure that I'll get lots of spam.
"Somehow I doubt this. If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning? Someone is buying."
..
I've heard that theory hundreds of times, and yes, someone idiots must be buying, but It doesnt help that you are letting know the spammers that "hey! what you're doing must be working!"
[alk]
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).
I'm a sysadmin at an ISP, and a few things I can tell you about spam are:
:-p But our block list of Korean proxies and relays is longer even than my dick became via the "most advanced and technologically profound penis enlargement program on the Internet."
:-)
* Most spam is not sent by some loser with a modem. It's sent by some loser with DSL, cable, or big pipes from a large ISP or colo shop. DIY spammers are small fry that no one even needs to care about.
* Most of it never gets delivered. Our spam filters see to it that over 80% of the spam that reaches our MXes dies there, either through direct refusal because of RBL use and our own private lists, or later via other spam filters. So how effective is spam gonna be when nobody ever sees the stuff? I hope some spammers are reading this. Better still, I hope some customers of spammers are reading this (but I doubt it, in either case).
* The entire Republic of Korea is an open proxy
Anybody else out there working at an ISP? Are you getting similar reject levels on spam rejection? If not, and you're using Exim, let's compare notes. Or if you are, and you're using Exim, let's compare notes.
Or if you're a spammer, send me your IP block
I'm about to explain how spam works, this is sad.
.001% is great when you send out 100 million messages. I belive the famous quote is "A suckers born every minute" add that to the spammers moto "If I send enough of these out someone will answer" and you have marketing success for a SPAMMEr.
SAPM work like a drift net. Cast a large enough net you will eventually find somone to buy your product. A success rate of
This article has NOTHING to do with SPAM or it's effectiveness. SPAMMERS JUST DON'T CARE. The story's author really should have labeled it differently, and the slashdot crew should know better.
cluge
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
I totally agree with the concepts in this article. The level of interest in a message goes down the more people there are on the list. However for spam I don't think this matters. Basicly what we're talking about here is a law of diminishing returns. The more people you send it to the less likely each person is to respond. But so what? If you are a spammer you can overcome the resulting reluctance to act on the part of your targets by simply hitting many more targets. For these people any extra response, even at a diminishing rate, is a success. And I'm sure sales people don't see an extra cost in sending a message to 1 million people over 100,000. There may be a cost in bandwidth, but I'd bet the ad people can't even spell it. So to them if 100,000 mails gets you 300 responses and 1 million gets you an extra 100 for a total of 400, then send the 1 million. Plus, I'm willing to bet that this bystander issue mentioned in the article peters out at a certain level. If I get a message sent to 1,000 people and then I get one sent to 2,000 people, I'm not going to know the difference. It's not like I'd count the number of people on the list. My guess is that the law of diminishing returns, in this case, stops diminishing at some point.
Don't any of you chuckleheads ever bother to read the actual article? It is NOT about spam (UCE). It is about asking for information from multiple people. Since spam often uses BCC, the article isn't even relevant. As to why the so-called "Cmdr Taco" wouldn't realise this, we can only assume that HE hasn't read the article either. Maybe HE should change his name to "Cmdr Chucklehead." +5 (longer than most other +5s)
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Someone is buying...
Yes, indeed. And they must be stopped at all costs by whatever means necessary.
Why bother.
I use evolution as my email client, and it has the excellent ability to filter mail as it comes..I can filter on subject, or address. If I get spam , I can right click the spam, and do a "Filter on Sender", and then I can do a *@spam.* to autodelete the spam. I have about 7 email addresses, and I have so much spam filtered..it takes a couple of seconds for it to "crunch" all the spams...Nip it at the bud I say
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
CBC radio had a story on a few years ago about people who were awakened during the night by an autodialer (heh heh Homer) that was searching for fax machines. The reporter interviewed some of the spammers, most were not very helpful of course, and most of them said that if they tried 10,000 or 100,000 numbers and only 1% of them responded then it was profitable for them. So you if you imagine the amount of spam being sent and then consider that possibly 1% of people respond to it then you can see that it is worth it to the spammer. I suppose the squegee kids think the same thing.
wow im shocked....
even though i spend hours a week blocking addresses for my company i dont even 'read' the crap.
Too bad i cant sue them for lost time ( ie my wage ) and bandwidth useage. ( its not free pushing around all that pornographic images.. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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?
And Cmdr Burrito doesn't bother to do any filtering, let alone proofreading.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning? Someone is buying.
No no. It is just that some one is trying harder.
One of my friends set up a web based emailer that rocks: netmails.net. It totally rocks. Let's you create a unique email address for each website that demands one. And you can attach lifetimes to them so that they expire as soon as you get that shipping confirmation. Or you can tag it as coming from a particular registration attempt etc. Really cool.
Pyramid schemes do work - just not by the stage that complete strangers are asking you to join. They work very well for the people who start them and their friends at level 1.
--
E_NOSIG
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!
If you really want to end Spam globally rather than just on your own account...
-- use a blacklist in conjuction with auto reply --
Therefore, repetitive spammers will be repetedly spammed!
TodayTM BillyJoelTM GoogleTMd for StitchTMes due to WindowsTM while RollerbladeTMing with an AppleTM and a PopsicleTM
Uh, maybe because you're email address is all over http://slashdot.org everyday?
feints within feints, wheels within wheels
> hundred pieces of it every morning? > Someone is buying.
Wrong. The fact that people send huge volumes of spam does not mean anyone is buying. Indeed, most spam comes from people who have been duped by list-sellers and email-sending-service sellers, into believing the same logical mistake.
Dozens of dot-com companies spent tens of millions of dollars on TV and radio advertising. They wouldn't do that unless it worked, right? But if that's true, why did they all go bankrupt, and why did so some report that they spent more money on advertising than they received in gross sales?
For a clever spammer, it costs almost nothing to send spam, so the mere prospect of a single sale is enough to justify sending millions of spams. For a stupid spammer who believes what the remailer or list-seller says, spamming is a bad business decision, just as many folks who advertise in the newspaper or yellow pages would probably not do so if they tracked the results and compared the cost.
The culprits for spam are ignorance and greed, not actual profit.
-- http://www.MarkWelch.com/ Pleasanton California
It's just plain bad email ettiquite to send an email an reveal the *list* your sending it to, unless your sending it to a specific group for a reason (e.g., a work group and you want it obvious who received a copy).
I totally agree with the article... if I see that the email *looks* to be generic (subject line doesn't affect me personally) and then I see the CC line has more than 2 or 3 names on it, I almost universally delete them without reading further. I usually also find myself thinking hostile thoughts about the sender, because I consider it a privicy issue when the sender reveals MY address to someone I do not know or am not affiliated with (simply because it allows others to build email lists with my name on them).
Interestingly enough, a year or so ago, most spammers (and yes, I know the article was not about spamming) were not revealing the CC list, but lately, more and more have seemed to reveal the CC list (probably because they're trying to get more efficiency from sendmails that they're relaying through).
Another VERY disturbing trend is placing a valid email address as the return address to an email, but never routing the email through that users computer. I have had a number of emails *bounce* to me from AOL because the recipient's name no longer exists. Careful examination of the expanded headers shows that my email address was used as the FROM address, but at no time did the email pass our servers except for the final rejection from AOL. This is a very nasty trend.
This study has absolutely nothing to do with spam. Advertising is a medium that is supposed to be directed at a wide audience. The study is about diffusion of responsibility.
Jesus.
That's not necessarily the case. How many of those spam-messages are from a repeat offender? The company who spams once, spending their market budget to some slick willy whose convinced them that spam works, got rich. They lost their marketing budget, and because they didn't get enough replies to their spam-campaign, they don't have any more income to spam with!
Thus the viscious cycle ends, and our slick willy finds another company foolish enough to give him money to help them send out spam and use up their marketing budget. Hmm...does that make him a public servant for helping companies go out of business faster?
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
OK let's suppose the research methods actually are reasonable and those bar charts represent the actual response rate to spam.
THERE'S ONLY A 10% DIFFERENCE
Hence, as long as you send it to 11% more people (or, as is more likely, 100,000% more people, you still get more responses.
If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning? Someone is buying.
Because it costs nothing to send. If they get one more customer because of their spam, they probably break even. Bastards.
It works, as long as you're not BCC:d.
Mats
Given that the researchers used a test consisting of cc:ing from 1 to 4 additional people, I found this to be of more interest when I thought of it in terms of how I might send an email from myself. I mean...the last thing I do is see who else the Spammer hit when I decide to hit the deleted button. "Oh yeah, this guy spammed ME and only ME...maybe I'll just go check out his link." Right.
Content analysis details: (3 hits, 1.5 required)
Hit! (3.0 points) BODY: Contains "Toner Cartridge"
Hit! (2.4 points) BODY: Plugs Viagra
Hit! (-2.4 points) AWL: Auto-whitelist adjustment
My blog
Gee... I'd hate to see the CC: field for that test message...
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Premise: For every 10,000 pieces of spam mail sent at least 1 gets a 'buyer'
<lots of math>
Conclusion: A sucker is born every minute
While you may be correct in your math, you fail to realize that while there may be 600000 suckers born each year, 90% or more of them will not have email addresses. So while the number of suckers may be high, the valid email address to sucker ratio is not nearly as good as an e-marketer might like.
I will not argue with you on that. But still 10% of 6 billion is a lot and there unfortunately are enough suckers to make spamming worthwhile.
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.
Even here you can often backtrack through the headers and figure out how it arrived in your mailbox, especially if your mail host adds e.g. an "X-Apparently-To:" header.
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
That "someone" must be CowbowNeal.
;-)
That's well-known that:
1 - He has the biggest penis in the world
2 - He's the richest Cowboy on earth and only works from home, 30 minutes a day
3 - He got a pill that fixes every medical related problem or your money back less shipping/handling (which represent 90% of the purchase)
4 - He's a genius since he has every possible degree from any possible University
5 - blah blah blah...
The spam really changed his world, it can do the same for you ! Hit the reply button NOW and get 50% if you're the next customer to reply !
RedVortex
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.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
There's a sucker born every minute, right? They gotta buy from somewhere...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Some of the more unscrupulous ones do it, I'm sure. As I hardly ever dig into my spam, I wouldn't know. I can speak from an Amway/Quixtar point of view having been involved during their internet rollout. They can any distributor they find spamming in their guise. 6 month suspention, then permanently for a second offense if I remeber right.
Just a happy thought of the day: You're job is a pyrimid scheme. ^__^
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I have a subdomain at cjb.net and although I get so much spam to it that I just ignore everything, it has never been attacked by brute force or with any common names. All spam is sent to firstname@subdomain (the address which I always gave out).
So, who is selling you up the river?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
That's easy. Sending out a spam advertisement costs essentially nothing. If you send out a million copies, then even if only a handful of people buy your product, then it's worth it, because the spamming had essentially zero cost. Of course, in this cost-benefit analysis, companies aren't taking into account the possible damage to their reputation by spamming, but I'm sure that's the way they see it. Only when it becomes prohibitively expensive to send spam will companies stop doing it.
Big ISPs like AOL should email everyone on their network pointing out that their service would be much faster and cheaper if people didn't buy penis-enlarging pills from spams... maybe that'd entice the stupid people from buying from spam. I mean, if they send around emails to people in hopes that Bill Gates will pay them $50 for each forward, then wouldn't they respond to "Don't listen to spam ads, and things will be cheaper/faster"?
But are those standard or metric minutes?
Xaotik Designs
Very funny.
This would be true if appropriately as many suckers died in a year as there are born. Actually, that doesn't sound very far-fetched at all.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
I just use AMPHERSAND#64; for the @ sign. No other "encryption" is required, because they don't do expansion of any HTML entities. If they ever do start doing it, I'll just resort to what you said (using an entire set of enities), but I doubt it'll come to that ever.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
And he discovered it the hard way. I don't think anyone here will ever forget how he blacklisted himself from every IT employer in the industry.
http://www.theonion.com/onion3825/anti-spam_legisl ation.html
Heh, I meant it as more of a joke than anything else but it is possible you are correct!
If you want to avoid spam. Just get an e-mail address such as abuse@yourdomainhere.com. After 4 years with using this type of scheme, I have yet to get spammed.
So, would it be a terrible thing to send lots of SPAM solely for the research factor (not actually building a marketting database), that may actually prove (statistically of course) that SPAM doesn't work?
Hell, this last weekend, I spent several hours doing some basic analysis on my parent's SPAM folder, and enabled server side filters to reject most of their SPAM. Still waiting on the stats of effectiveness from that. I have another trick up my sleeve. TMDA is a very cool thing. Particularly when you admin your own email server. heh.
-Alex
What about my need for a BIGGER BUST and my FUNDS BEING HELD BY THE NIGERIAN OIL CORP?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Spam is a double-edged sword. It has an impact in both
directions. Whether the revenue-increasing impact outweighs
the revenue-decreasing impact depends on a number of factors.
Both impacts are directly proportional to the number of unique
recipients, but other factors increase or reduce one impact
more than the other. A small handul of examples first (and
then I'll draw a conclusion afterward):
* The revenue-decreasing impact is proportional to the
legitimacy and fame of the advertised product, as well
as the legitimacy and fame of the seller. This is
because if your company and product are already selling
well, it only takes a very small percentage of negative
responses (people avoiding you because they associate
you with spam) to have a significant impact.
* The revenue-increasing impact is proportional to the
moron-appeal of the product. Because morons have less
discernment, and are less likely to realise that the
spam is bulkmail, less likely to realise that they did
not in fact subscribe as you claim, less likely to be
skeptical of the legitimacy of a business that has to
resort to spam to make sales, and so on. Similar
reasoning applies to the moron-appeal of the spiel.
* The revenue-decreasing impact is proportional to the
number of duplicate recipients (people who get N copies
of it within the span of short-term memory).
* The revenue-increasing impact is inversely proportional
to the difficulty of responding and making a purchase.
* The revenue-decreasing impact is inversely proportional
to the difficulty of tracking down the identity of the
seller, which often correlates with the difficulty of
responding and making a purchase. That is, the things
that will enable intelligent consumers to avoid you are
(some of) the same things that allow morons to make the
purchase.
There are others.
The conclusion I draw is that we'll continue to see spam
advertising fly-by-night companies and dubious products, but
as the advertising industry begins to understand how spam
works, and why it works (which will be a gradual process
over probably several decades) we should see a nearly entire
dearth of spam advertising legitimate products and companies.
This will decrease the desirability (if that be possible) of
making a purchase from a spammer, while simultaneously
increasing the effectiveness of spam as a whole (since it
will only be sent in cases where it would be effective).
Although the increasing total amount of spam sent may hold
the effectiveness of spam as a whole in check or even
destroy it (by saturation).
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Sending email to all of my associates is a bit different than sending bulk email to an email address list. Further, it is far more likely that if I send email to my associates, all of their names and email addresses will show up in the address filed.
Spammers have tools that can "personalize" each piece of spam so that only one individual's name shows up making it harder to tell that it's spam. Well, until you read the subject line and realize that yet another individual is concerned with the size of your genitals.
I consider spam as unsolicited commercial email not just a mass mailing that includes me.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Not true.
Although, you are not in the To, or CC list, the headers contain the address that was intended for delivery. This has to be known, as the email server that you use needs to know what address an email is actually for. You won't know the other email addresses that were hidden, but you will know yours.
-Alex
Isn't your calculation assuming that the entire Earth's population is born & dies every year? You need to limit your population to annual births.
According to http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/wp98.html there are 130^6 births/year worldwide. So based on your calc:
130^6/10^4=13000 suckers/yr
13000 suckers/yr / 525600 minutes/yr = 0.025 suckers/min
So a sucker isn't born every minute but about every forty minutes.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Funny as this may be :-) the math is utterly bogus.
I agree down to the point where you establish that there are 6e5 (NOT 6e6, as you say in the next paragraph) suckers on Earth.
Then you divide the number of suckers by the number of minutes in a year. This tells us nothing, except what number of suckers per birth minute per year. The calculation is only valid if each person lives 1 year only. It's as if you had said "There are 7 suckers on Earth. A week has seven days. A sucker is born every day!"
Now, according to worldpop.org, there are about 0.022 children, per person, per year born in this world. Multiplied by 6e9 persons, this makes 132 million people per year.
Now, acording to the premises 1/10,000:th of the people are suckers, which make 13.2 thousand/year. Divide the number of minutes per year by that and you will get the result:
A sucker is (in fact) born every 39.84:th minute
QED
I choose to remain celibate, like my father and his father before him.
Maybe someone should do a new study to prove/disprove the following hypothesis: the more buzzwords there are in a Slashdot article submission (e.g., 'spam'), the less likely it is that a Slashdot editor will actually read the article.
Mr Mugabe has told me my check for $1000000 from the Nigerian International Construction company will be released to my bank account as soon as my check to cover the $8000 in legal costs clears!
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
A few percent would be a good turnout for a TRADITIONAL, ethical marketing campaign!
Spam only needs a fraction of ONE percent. 100 people out of a million would probably make the spam profitable. Maybe even 10 people in a million.
I use a different email for every site that's insteresting enough to register to use. Recently I've been getting a lot of SPAM from my /. address. It gives new meaning to the term "Slashdotted".
The worst SPAM are the ones you can't even use. My breast need to get SMALLER not larger!! And my penis is already plenty big, thank you. And stop sending me Credit cards I can't apply for because I'm nto an American.
It makes you wonder, even if you had interested parties, how many of those SPAM emails actually makes it to those people at all.
I wished SPAM was as easy to deal with as junk mail. They should really pay for their crime.
As I've stated in other replies... it doesn't HAVE to default to sending a confirm message. And when I set it up, I put a list of email addresses for anyone that I know that has sent me an email in the last 6 months. This removes MOST of the confirmation bounces. And if I send an email to someone, I can setup a tag that tells my email server to add it to the whitelist automatically.
Most people that I know don't have a problem with replying ONCE to send an email. I mean, they reply to MY email, why not one the system sends on my behalf? Hell, it doesn't even require you to think of something to type. heh.
-Alex
My personal theory about spam involves two different thoughts:
1. Spam works on stupid newbies enough to make it worthwhile.
Alternatively,
2. Spam occurs as the result of people selling spamming tools (often by the use of spam) to people on whom spam is effective (see #1). One of the most-frequent uses of spam is to promote mailing software and the sale of email addresses.
These theories are not mutually exclusive.
I am glad that spam-promotions are actually harmful to the perpetrators. Unfortunately, I do not believe that most spam is legitimate or from legitimate companies. The unsophisticated level of spammers (read some of the messages sometimes - they are barely readable) leads me to believe that this study may have a marginal effect on the occasional "legitimate" company stupid enough to think about spamming.
Lots of petrified grits
First and foremost, this calculation is a joke. I don't expect you to take it any more than I do. It was made for humour value before intellectual value.
I remember reading up on a project, called JAMES, under the Apache Jakarta wing for a Java based MTA, with the Apache Avalon framework.
Such frameworks might encourage more advanced filter systems to come out, while maintaining efficiency. Unfortunately, it doesn't lend itself to be compatible with several MTAs.
-Alex
Read the FAQ for the reasons WHY they don't support Exchange.
:)
I can't exactly blame them. Unix based MTA's are still the dominant share anyway. Better planning should have been done before deciding to go the Exchange Server path, to consider these kinds of issues. If that planning did occur, then this conflict shouldn't be anything new and was already accepted as a risk. Deal with it.
-Alex
If I send out a non-personal message to five people, each with only his or her individual address on the "To: " line, they won't know how many people the message is sent out to unless the recipients all have contact with each other (such as people in the same office). I might have sent the non-personal message to five people or fifty thousand people. How would the size of the audience make a difference on the response rate (per person) if the audience doesn't know how big the audience is? This study assumes that the audience has a way of knowing how many people the message went out to, which is interestng in this case, since the message really went out to 120 people in each group - if list size is the same, then the study doesn't really mean a thing at all!
If multiple people are addressed on the "To:" line, then perhaps things change a bit. But considering how many factors these people tried to test in one study, I'm surprised that New Scientist would publish this - especially with a sample size of only 120 per test (single- and multiple-recipient mailings should be considered separate). And where is the control group? This is not a study, it's a record of observations, nothing more.
Given the nature of the results obtained by the study, this seems more useful for small-scale messages - such as sending out a question to twenty people in your addressbook simultaneously as opposed to sending out individual (or mail merged) messages.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
Spam is not effective at all in terms of real world advertising, as we all know. Spam companies obviously are not that expensive which probably hides the fact that even the low cost of spamming doesn't even closely cover the costs involved as the returns are probably close to zero. However there are enough companies that are willing and desperate enough to try it so that the spammers can exist for a certain length of time. Eventually though I reckon that spamming companies will die out for the most part with only the serious ones actually surviving.
Beware, your calculations are bogus, and I am afraid that you'll get a reply every minute...
Is this perhaps a Pascal's Wager in reverse kind of thing? If the cost to send out a near infinite quantity of spam is near zero, then the companies arent losing anything TANGIBLE by doing it. (user opinion is not tangible) All it takes is one person that wants a titanium watch or a penis enlargement to make it worth sending out 5 million emails. Lots of spammers dont use their own bandwidth, use open relay mail servers, and pay NOTHING.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
I've been using spamassassin on my qmail server and it r4wKs hardcore. Striaight up kills spam. It has some very very intelligent features. Check it out.
I say we talk the spammers into combining all their ads into one giant spam that we can get once a week.
Get your hot gay teen bestiality penis-enlarging viagra diploma life insurance here! We accept Pay-pal and immortal souls!
This message brought to you by the Council of People Who Are Sick of Seeing More People.
Alas, auto-reply bots like that are the perfect example of tragedy of the commons.
There's no way it can be used in a widespread fashion... Either spamcrap will automate replying to it, or every time you post to a mailing list you'll get hundreds of responses, or spam will forge itself to look like a mailing list message.
If everyone used it, we'll turn to everyone sending random confirm-emails to everyone else all the time.
Tragedy of the commons...
I bitbucket any one who uses it.
I received a letter today which was had a hand typed envelope, no return address from Long Island, NY. Someone had a folded up newspaper inside with a post it note that said "Jer - check this out, L" handwritten on it. The newspaper was custom to my city with some info about Government auctions. My wife called them to complain about this type of piece in today's age and they knew exactly what it said and how it was presented. Spam techniques moving to the real world, or did it start the other way around?
Jeremy
FaithFriends
So logially you're saying that since the dotcoms failed, everything they did was wrong. Or am I misreading that? Which we both know isn't true. One step forward two steps back. At any rate, spam is a lot like late night television. Who the hell is that targeted to? People who stay up late? And they, regardless of how cheap airtime is at that hour, are shelling out money. You think, Dang! Why do they air these lame shows?! Isn't there anything good on? Who watches this stuff?! And unlike the spammers, they are paying for that time. I have to ask why. Would any company even mildly intrested in making money simply flush money down the toilet like that? I have to say "no". My faulty logic says there must be some benefit in those damn infomercials for them and it's quite easy to extend that logic to spamming. Why rouse the ire of half the internet with mistargeted (or even aptly targeted) spam? Are they idiots? Don't they know better?!!? I'm sure some of them are idiots. But I'm betting, just betting the others are willing to brave the hate and discontent for a reason. The same could be said for spyware. It's on the rise. Who would be stupid enough to alinate blah blah blah...
So don't they know any better? I'm sure they do. In fact, I'll bet they know better than most people give them credit for.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
I'd have no problem whatsoever paying this. Most people wouldn't have a problem with it. Spammers? *chuckle*
It might possibly be wise to have special cases- like, businesses and corporations pay a DIME per outgoing email.
At which point- relax and give up all other ideas for spam control and legislation. Go ahead and spam, guys. Here's your bill. Your list of ten million email addresses will run... one hundred thousand dollars for ONE mail to each (that will be filtered/ignored by the recipient...) and if you're a business/corporation, hey! One million dollars please :D
People talk about the 'end of the free internet'... well, THIS would be a GOOD move in that direction. Take over email and make it so bulk mailers are forced to pay a share exactly proportional to their usage...
That's what I do too, but a while ago a friend of mine used one of the addresses I only give to people I know to send me an e-card, and that's been the end of this little scheme. :(
If you open yourself to the foo, You and foo become one.
Absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence.
You can say with certainty that if a certain email address gets spammed, that the company you gave it to sold it, but if it doesn't get spammed, that doesn't necessarily mean it hasn't been sold.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Of course I knew you meant it as a joke :-)
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning?
Same reason that VA Software hit 250. Some suckers are willing to invest in things that don't work.
Of 11,500 customers who trusted you enough to hand you their email addresses, you've alienated 11,489 and made 11 sales.
Hope it was worth it.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
http://smarden.org/qconfirm/qconfirm is a implementation of a delivery confirmation process for a mail address. It integrates nicely with qmail and effectively blocks spam.
That URL should be http://smarden.org/qconfirm/
Of course people (a.k.a. suckers) buy.
They buy the email lists so that they too can GET RICH FAST by sending GET RICH FAST spams.
I don't think very many actually buy all those toners and herbal viagra, I mean, if someone actually did, wouldn't they have run out of stock by now?!
Worked really well for the first tier, and the second, and maybe even the third.
It's the generation X'ers that are gonna get bent over by it.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
No.. Think of it carefully.. TMDA works by polluting everyone else. By forcing everyone else you contact to do extra work. This is tragedy of the commons.
Imagine a world where everyone uses it (or something similar), but, say, 10% have it misconfigured. This is a world with mailing lists.
Mailing list maintance functions (including initial requests to subscribe, or confirmation requests from web-maintance.) either get accepted automatically, (direct route for spam!), or force the mailing list admin to deal with the automated 'please reply to me' messages.. Which they'll ignore, then they'll still get users asking why email subscriptions don't work.
Mailing list messages... Post to a mailing list the first time and potentially get tens, hundreds, even thousands of 'please reply to me' messages. Hey, they only take a second each to deal with!
Now, imagine there's a daemon that autoreplies to such 'please reply to me' messages.. Well, just forge the spam to appear to come from a legitimate user, and guess what, the bounces go to them, and their client helpfully 'authenticates' the spam.. (The daemon can't be configured to record every email sent and only autoreply to autoreplies to emails the user actually sent. Many times people will use many systems and email servers, but only one email address.)
For more fun, you may even get mail loops of 'please reply to me' messages.
Now, in the above examples, you can eliminate this undesireable behavior by automatically accepting, unchecked, mailing list maintance messages, or autoreply messages, or a blanket opening for mailing list messages... However, spam can be easily forged to appear to be a maintance message or an autoreply message.
Under the assumption that there *will* be misconfigured clients, they'll have to deal with mailing lists that they don't know about. either by spamming posters to the list (unacceptable), or filtering them out into a seperate folder that the user will have to manually check.
In all cases, if the 'please reply to me' messages are mechanically replyable, then a daemon will be created to deal with that trash automatically, and most users will use it. (So, spammers can forge their email to come from almost any user, and the daemon of the forged address reply.) Or, those messages can be used to indicate that an email address is life. (Send a message to someone using TMDA, confirm that they use TMDA, now you know you can forge spam from that address and their daemon will authenticate it for you for free!)
Of course the other option here is to spam from legitimate hosts that have been cracked by today's IIS/outlook worm. (Or one of the 30,000 infected code-red machines.) The cracked systems run email servers and reply automatically.
Now, if the 'please reply to me' messages are NOT mechanically replyable, then we've saturated the internet with an even larger amount of trash and mail pollution that has to be dealt with on a message-by-message basis. (As per the above scenario's.)
In any case. TMDA is not a solution, its a problem.
TMDA and any other scheme that requires such automated response to all sent emails is tragedy of the commons. There's no better example. It superficially helps the user, to the detriment of everyone else. Ergo, it will proliferate and everyone will be even worse off.
...if you can see how many others received the mail. Most SPAM I get used BCC.
Why is there only one Monopolies commission?
If a 1-year-old is weaned onto solids, does he/she cease to be a sucker?
You have received this message in error.
The saying was based on planet populations and reproductive rates of people back in Barnum's day. Perhaps if we had THAT data we could extrapolate the current rate of suckers ... I will look into this further and get back to you with my results.
In this calculation, I am saying a billion is 10^9.
Sorry, I couldn't be fucked to turn it into a link.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Dipshits.
Somebody mod that parent to -5, oblivion.
Exceeding the recommended torque is not recommended.
"It's assholes like you that attract aircraft towards tall buildings."
/. where many of us would prefer to have open and honest debate.
Aww, and you started off that post so well.
You had some good points, you made some good statements, but you still didn't answer my questions
This thread isn't about porn and it's merits, this thread isn't about sex and whether or not it should be considered good or evil. This thread was started by me to address the fact that spammers do not target who gets the ads. My points are that porn spam gets sent to children, women get ads offering to increase thier penises, men get offers for breast enhancement. You were the one who turned this into an argument on human sexuality.
I asked you to discuss this like a rational being and all you do is curse (which is your right and I do not deny that, but it is a bit childish) and you make accusations against me.
The attitude that you have shown me leads me to believe that with your type of antagonistic discussion style, you would be happier on a discussion forum more to format of "Jerry Springer" and not on
Reply if you feel that you must, but I wash my hands of you.
Toodles!
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
Taco is the guy who posted about Spamassain and Razor. Razor is the real brains behind any anti-spam system. But I check my mail often enough not to want to deal with anti-spam tools. Just add a filter that looks for your e-mail address in the header. If it isn't there, then it's either a mailing list (which you can filter before hand) or spam. Then the ones that do put you in the To/CC feilds you can just unsubscribe from or erase the one message a day.
-Nicholas Blasgen