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The Continuing Rise of E-Mail Marketing
Mark Cantrell writes: "Yahoo is running a story from Reuters Internet Report that says that companies like Doubleclick are becoming more popular with online businesses because of the low price they charge. $25 for 1000 people spammed is the example given. They do mention that there is a threat that spam may get out of hand, however. May get? Obviously they haven't seen my mailbox or Usenet lately. My favorite quote from the article:
'I think spam is becoming a problem,' Bluefly's Seiff said. 'Any time you get clutter in your mailboxes, it is not beneficial to e-mail marketers like us.'" The article touches on true spam, but mostly talks about the much more benign stuff lumped under "direct marketing," like reminder updates from stores you cleared to send it to you.
There is no good reason why its not illegal either. They restrict what telemarketers are legally allowed to do. They can't keep calling you over & over with the same pitch, but you can be spammed countless times.
I'm glad there are people out there making these spammers lives hell. More power to them :) Hopefully someone will have the balls to just start serial killing these spammers.
the only thing effectively being marketed by email marketing is... itself.
take the boulder pledge!
Go to http://www.overture.com and search for 'bulk email'. Then click on each of the links. Do this once every day. The amount this will cost each spammer is displayed on the search results page.
ISPs get hit with dictionary attacks to find usernames. They find an ISP, and mail every possible username they can come up with. These emails have some kind of web bug or somesuch in them, so that they can tell the good email addresses. They then have a fairly complete list of all email addresses at a given ISP. (Or at least those email accounts that use Outlook & OE) Another method they use is to send their messages to every domain, using a few of the more common usernames, (ie. sales, info, support) (Also, for the sake of completeness, harvesting whois info, crawling web pages, scraping usenet posts, web forms, and "contests" of various sorts.)
I recently set our mail server to block all messages that contain
<img src="http://\d{2,3}\.
This has cut down the amount of spam we get by a good 90%. There are still some messages that have height tags or otherwise don't fit the regexp.
I got a 3rd party spam a few weeks ago on behalf of a company that sells retail women's clothing. Needless to say, since I am not a woman there was no way I had signed up for mail from them. Just another spam, right? Well, it's a company that my mother is a huge fan of, and is actually on a friendly basis with the owners (though they're public now - she bought a healthy-sized chunk when they went public and has done nicely) going way back. So I mentioned it to her, and how I was disappointed that they had resorted to using a spamhaus.
A couple of days later, I got a very apologetic call at work from their head of marketing. It seems they really didn't understand the difference between opt-in mailing, self-managed lists, and spamhauses. We talked about how to manage a mail list for nearly an hour - I wound up answering a _lot_ of questions (I made some suggestions as well), and got a promise on her behalf that they would try to be good netizens going forward. We also talked about things like banner advertising, the best sites to do reciprocal banners as well as purchased ads, and a lot more.
The reason I'm bringing this up is that I really think there are companies out there that are clueless about electronic marketing in general. So they listen to a spammer who can sound like a legitimate businessman, look at the numbers that get handed to them, and say, "why not", without realizing the damage that can get done to their reputations.
Then again, a lot of folks who get this crap in their inboxes don't even realize that it's wrong. Unfortunately, folks are starting to get accustomed to tons of junk mail, and only a relative few of us are vocal about it.
One interesting point in the article - one mailer supposedly had statistics showing that 70% of their e-mails were opened. Well, that means they were using webbugs - proof that everyone should use mailer agents that either can disable network access or refuse to display HTML.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
The basic point I never seem to see mentioned is that SPAM does work.
How you ask? Quite simple, it's not supposed to make money for the people actually sending the email. It's supposed to make money for the people selling the mass email lists/services.
It's the same as the California Gold Rush days; the vast majority of people who made money were the ones selling shovels, not using them.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
On the broader issue: I've felt for some time that what will eventually happen is that folks will simply go with mechanisms that require unknown senders to send a confirmation that they're legitimate. Much like some of the ones mentioned in response to the previous spam-related article.
Right now my spam load at home is running about 99% spam (discounting mailing list traffic) and at work: approx. 25% on weekdays and up to 95% on weekends and holidays. I have positively draconian anti-spam protections in place and *still* my end-users at work complain about spam. "Authenticated" senders will be, I think, the only way to a final solution. And I do believe that, if widely enough employed, that solution will drive a nail into the spam coffin.
The key distinction here is between spam, and targeted email marketing.
I get a lot of targeted direct mail in my post box. This morning I got info from two banks (that we dont use) and a mail order service. 3
I get a lot of targeted direct email in my mail box from identifiable companies offering things that might be interesting. This morning I got stuff from Security, Project Management, a few games sites. 4
I get a lot of Spam. This morning I was offered a big knob, hot babes, viagra, hair, part time work, katie, investment opportunities... etc... 46
The first and last of these I hate. The first because of the wasted paper, the second because its a pain in the arse.
The middle one I don't have the slightest problem with. I can always unsubscribe and sometimes they are useful / interesting.
Most people have a good common sense idea what distinguishes FREE OFFER!!! from New at ComponentSource
Spam marketers and the larger companies who help them have adopted the exact mindset used by the giants of direct mail marketing.
The president of one of these companies was once asked if he cared about all the junk mail being forced through a person's postbox. The response was "There's no such thing as junk mail. There is such a thing as a junk customer."
Getting your name pulled off 3 of the major lists in the US can drop the amount of credit card applications, free catalogs, and other junk mail by around 80%. Such a thing needs to exist in the spam world, rather than useless "unsubscribe here" links that fail to have any real affect.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
You're overestimating the spammer's sense of ethics. In the situation you describe, the spammers will get laid. Spammers would just ram the chicks' car off the road and rape them.
I mean, they asked for it, right? If they didn't wanna get banged, they shouldn't be on the informayshun s00perhighway with all the responsible murketers, right?
Spammer #1: "I looked out the window and held down my horn for 10 seconds, and she glanced at me for a second before flipping me the bird and driving off! But I got a good look at her! That's opt-in!"
Spammer #2: "My chick could have unsubscribed by just giving me a blowjob. But she didn't want to! It's her fault for not unsubscribing!"
Spammer #3: "I was just expressing my views on sexuality to her! Frea Speach is Garonteed by thuh First Amundmint!"
Spammer #4: "Just because she said '550 - fuck off, spammer' with every shafting didn't mean she might not change her mind a few seconds later!"