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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.
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
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?
Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.
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
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.
http://pyzor.sourceforge.net/
HTH
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
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.
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.
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.
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
> I'm gonna put my email down here... maxcohen@meditech.com and find out how quickly spammers harvest it
Nice try Max. If you need a Penis enlarger, just say so. You don't have to pretend this is a "market experiment".
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
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
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.
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.
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.
"regsvr32 /u swflash.ocx" will solve any problems relating to flash.
funny munging
Hello, maxcohen!
Did you know that if you got a NEW REFILLED LASER TONER CARTRIDGE, you could ENLARGE YOUR PENIS UP TO THREE INCHES so that HORNY TEEN CHEERLEADERS would want your manliness that you enhanced with your HERBAL VIAGRA? It would even be better if you were OUT OF DEBT thanks to this opportunity to MAKE MONEY FAST using our new MASS MAILING SOFTWARE. Then you could take the HORNY TEEN CHEERLEADERS on your FREE VACATION!
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
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
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".
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.
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
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!)
E-mail plans for a penis enlarger: Pretty much $0 to manufacture. ;p
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
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"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"
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).
The only way to get the point across to the execs will come too late, when your co-lo provider shuts you down and your Web site's off the air because of the spam complaints or when your legitimate e-mails to legitimate customers and business contacts start to bounce because you've been flagged as a spammer. What nobody's figured out is how to get this cost across to the execs in a dollars-and-cents way they understand.
An interesting observation about spam was made a few years ago by either Dylan Tweeny or Robert Sideman (I forget who):
Spam doesn't actually have to work. It only has to give the APPEARANCE that it works.
The real money in the spam business comes not from spamming itself but from selling spam services -- mailing lists, distro services, and so on -- to (if you'll pardon the stock market analogy) greater fools.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
I see it differently:
Spam == miracle diet
Business using spam == fat gullible self-esteem-deficient poor bastard
The considerable amount of spam-promoting spam made me think of it in these terms.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Good points indeed. Perhaps you're right that TV ads aren't as effective as they used to be. I'll concede that point because I've see nmuch of what you and the other person who replied to you mentioned.
However, they still are better than Spam for two reasons. It does target the consumer by the demographics on the program, and because many TV ads are more amusing than Spam...hell in some cases are more interesting than the TV show is
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
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?
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!
> 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.
Quite so, but I bet in reality - it's really a "mixed bag". I bet some spam does generate revenue, while other spam is a complete waste of time.
:)
For example, I've been spammed with those offers of a "free phone" or "free pager" (where you'll indeed get the item free, up-front, but only upon signing some sort of 1 or 2 year contract). While I'd never waste my time with that, the people still interested in relatively low-tech like a pager (or those who *still* haven't ever bought that cellphone they've been thinking about for years) might go for this.
They aren't likely to be the type educated enough on Internet issues to realize that it's always unwise to respond to spam. They also probably only check email rarely, compared to the more "computer savvy", so they may not realize spam like this is so pervasive.
Heck, some of them may even think it earns them some "bragging rights" to proudly say they got a "great deal" on their new item "on the Internet!".
I have to think they're just about out of people clueless enough to repond to spam begging for your bank account number, so some head of a foreign govt. can deposit funds in there temporarily - and split the earnings with you later.
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.]
It works, as long as you're not BCC:d.
Mats
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.
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.
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
But do you have flash problems that need solving?
funny munging
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
So, who is selling you up the river?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
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.
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.
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
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!
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
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.
Advertisers will eventually need to change their business model to accomodate the change in people's lifestyles that has occurred over the past half a century if they hope to stay in business. I don't know exactly what sort of change it will be, but I'll bet it's going to be a lot more annoying than 3 or 4 minutes worth of TV commercials every 6 or 7 minutes.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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.
Another interesting thing is that TV Ads are considered successful if they get noticed (OK - that's not ENTIRELY correct... the Taco Bell dog was axed after popularity wasn't leading to increased sales). However, web advertisements seem to be considered a failure if they don't generate immediate click-throughs.
Sure. Advertising does have to change as their audience begins to react differently (often becoming more indifferent, jaded, and resistant to the "message"). But even if current advertising still works, professionals are compelled to improve its effectiveness for various reasons; joy in the process, recognition from peers, bonus pay, promotions, etc.
One final thought - advertisers are focused on advertisements. Effective advertising is their ultimate goal. Sometimes these professionals get so wrapped up in achieving that goal... they seem genuinly startled by any backlash generated when their newest project angers the public (due to interfering with the product, privacy issues, taste, etc).
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.
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.
What nobody's figured out is how to get this cost across to the execs in a dollars-and-cents way they understand.
Actualy the execs in legitimate companies do get it. They put up a website listing their products with the prices and shipping information. They know when people are shopping, they will search for them. The spammers are usualy slimeballs not to be trusted. With shoddy products that cost nothing or next to nothing to produce. (photocopied etc.) I figured out long time ago to NEVER buy anything from a TELEMARKETER, DIRECT MAIL ADVETISER, or SPAMMER. When I do need to buy items like toner (I do use it) or bulk ink jet ink (I refill my own) I search the web. I then check the reputation of the supplier (including brick and morter address, BBB, hate sites, Telephone support line, etc.). If everything checks out, I sample the product with a small order before using them as a regular supplier. I usualy place my first order by telephone instead of online. A real contact goes a long ways in sorting out sweatshop bulk e-mail centers. Using this technique I am happy to report I get good quality refill ink for $14/half pint for the color inks. I use it regularly to print photographs with no problems. That ink savings alone has saved me enough to buy a color laser printer. Guess where I'm getting toner! Spamming me with a great offer will not get me to change suppliers. If I become unhappy with my current suppliers, I'll repeat the search process. If or when I become unhappy with my sex equipment or performance, I'll search for a supplier with a reputation that can make a real diffrence. The search does not include my inbox.
In summary, If you have a product to sell, list it online so I can find it when I am ready to buy. Put the details online so I can check if the product meets my needs. I bought ink from someone that not only sold ink, but provided all the detailed howto information online. These people knew what worked and what didn't and were glad to share the information online for free.
If you want to buy something, research it first and search for competive products. You don't have to spend $30 for a refill kit good for 2 refills. For the same $30 you can do much better. The same is true for most products. Don't buy on price alone. I knew I found someone that was really in the business when I found out I could buy ink in sizes up to 55 gallon drums. This was not a small kit seller. Avoid the junk. There is plenty. What good is cheap insurance if your valid claim is always rejected and will require a court battle to collect? Check the ratings before you buy. Learn about the seller. If you can't find anythng about the company, that's A BAD SIGN! (big waving red flag)
The truth shall set you free!
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.
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.
Sorry, I couldn't be fucked to turn it into a link.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
"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"