Slashdot Mirror
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.
Makes me wonder if the SPAMmers have anything to do with this KLEZ bastard. I hope they catch the guy who wrote it, and feed him just spam for 32 years in his jail cell.
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."