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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
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.
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
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.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
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.
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
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.
-... ---
> 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
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.
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.
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
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'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
"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).
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.
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?
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...
You sound qualified to write Running a Porn Site for Dummies (Or "Setup a Porn Site in 21 Days with Java and XML"). Even if one decides against it, it could make for an interesting read.....minus the Java and XML.
Table-ized A.I.
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
Gee... I'd hate to see the CC: field for that test message...
Your Servant, B. Baggins
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
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.