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.

Comments

Spam works!

[pieterh]

My penis is 12" long, and I have never run out of laser toner. Surely this proves it!?

Re:Spam works!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone translate this: AÁÙ¦bâúÃ20%H¥Î¥dÜ??

I think it may be an important message since they keep sending it to me everyday to multiple addresses. I think someone I know may be hurt or lost in China.

Re:Spam works!

[pieterh]

Did you never read your spam? You attach the full toner cartridges to your penis with a string... it hurts, and the cartridges kinda make a noise when you walk around town, but after five years I can honestly say that it works. Also, you *never* run out of toner... it's always just there, within reach. Just send me $50 today and I'll send detailed instructions!
A word of advice... if anyone asks, tell them you're doing experimental art. If it's a pretty girl that asks, say you were selected from several hundred prospective artists because of the girth and strength of your equipment.
Spam saved my life - it can do the same for you. Don't hesitate - send me the money NOW!

Re:Spam works!

[Tablizer]

My penis is 12" long, and I have never run out of laser toner. Surely this proves it!?

Yes, but it started out 13" long and you only have an inkjet, which never draws upon the laser cartrigdes.

You've been suckered, dude. Take your spammers and your shortened wanker to court.

Faulty conclusion

[maiden_taiwan]

The study was about asking informational questions, not about hawking products to the masses. The "bystander effect" doesn't apply here.

Re:Faulty conclusion

[kiwimate]

Someone who read the article -- will wonders never cease?

You're correct. The "researchers" in question sent out an e-mail to students, staff, etc., at the Technion technology institute (where they work), asking if the institute had a biology faculty. This is rather different from someone sending out an e-mail to 10,000 random addresses, offering... well, you know what they offer... and hoping for a bite from a small percentage.

The methodology utilized, the fact they were seeking information rather than selling something a la normal spam, etc., etc. -- I just don't think there's any way you can legitimately extrapolate this to apply to spam in the accepted sense of the word.

Obvious?

[Geeyzus]

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

Re:Obvious?

[gmack]

Actually having 2 diffrent past employers experiment with it I can tell you first hand that is exactly correct.

The smaller lists are more likely to be a list of previous customers or otherwise targeted.

The larger lists on the other hand are likely to be spidered off websites and ripped from newspostings then minimally cleaned to find the easy to spot bad addresses.

The larger lists are also more likely to get people so pissed off about spam that they are likely to do something about it that involves a loss of resources on the spammer's side.

Re:Obvious?

[jdreed1024]

Basic statistics!

14% of all statistics are made up on the spot. Besides, statistics don't mean anything. 32% of all people know that.

I have 4 Letters for you....

[dmarien]

T.M.D.A.

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 /.ers are running qmail and managing your own email server, i wholeheartedly reccommend you investigate tmda. I enjoy checking my mail again.

Re:I have 4 Letters for you....

[Scutter]

My problem is that, while it will keep the spam out of my mailbox, the TMDA method still consumes resources on my server. Doubly so now, too because each incoming "unknown" mail will generate an outgoing message. If I can deny the message before the session even reaches the DATA phase (i.e. by using RBL's and checking the header), then I don't have to deal with the spam at all.

Headline is wrong.

[imta11]

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.

Re:Headline is wrong.

[Peyna]

Yeah, it doesn't say anything at all about anonymous e-mails to people soliciting goods and services. It's about writing a group of people you know asking for assistance with something, etc. Of course, I wonder if it would have the same effect if you simply used the BCC: line and wrote it so they thought they were the only person receiving. It isn't too difficult to send mail to a large group of people and make it appear that each person is the only receiving it. If they know other people got it, then yes, they're more than likely going to assume someone else will do it.

Re:Headline is wrong.

[outlier]

Of course, I wonder if it would have the same effect if you simply used the BCC: line and wrote it so they thought they were the only person receiving.

The study in the article did just that. Some of the people received an email that looked like it was just to them, others saw many names in the to: field. They found that people who thought they were singled out were more likely to be helpful.

The relevant psychological phenomena are called bystander apathy and diffusion of responsibility. In each, the more people in a group, the less likely each individual is to help/work.

This is nothing particularly new, it just says that people behave consistently in person or when contacted by email. It has nothing to do with commercial SPAM, only with requests for information/help to others.

Do something about it Taco....

[reaper20]

Somehow I doubt this. If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning? Someone is buying.

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 /dev/null ... it even makes getting spams fun.

Hell, if you need help, fork over one of them slashdot.org email addresses and I'll help you for free. :P

You're getting spam because you don't use Pyzor

[Moderation abuser]

http://pyzor.sourceforge.net/

HTH

Are they really buying??

[CarrionBird]

I think a main reason we still get 20+ spams a day is not that they're effective, but that they're very cheap. In conparsion to other forms of advertising, the cost of spam is trivial.

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.

Article not about commercial spam . . .

[SimplyCosmic]

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.

Re:Delete

[Heem]

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.

OMG! A sucker *is* born every minute!!!!

[Jucius Maximus]

"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"

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!)

Re:Rules of not getting spammed.

[Jucius Maximus]

"1. Don't put your email address on the web."

And if you absolutely must put the address on the web, make sure you encode it using something like Mailto Encrypter so that spambots will not catch it.

I have addresses posted on websites for months now which receive NO spam at all because they are encoded.

someone's buying

[Vodak]

"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

How To Stop Spam

[the eric conspiracy]

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).

Re:I'll tell you why Spam doesn't work.

[Phoenix]

How you got modded up to 2 Is beyond me. The REASON that it isn't appropriate is because I do NOT need to have a naked woman on my screen when I'm trying to teach my grandmother how to conect to her e-mail NOR do I need that displayed when children are around.

If you think that such pictures are sutable for display whenever and wherever it pops up regardless of who's in the room, then I'm not the one with "pretty much warped values" now am I?

Logical Failure: If They Do It, It Must Work

[markwelch]

> If Spam didn't work, why do I get a
> 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.

Number of Recipients

[Bilbo]

Also, their conclusion was based on the fact that the recipients knew how many other people were included in the CC: field. The more people there were, the less likely they were to respond. All pretty intuitive, but hardly applicable to email that is addressed to hundreds of thousands of people.

Gee... I'd hate to see the CC: field for that test message...