The Economics Of Spamming

Shardleton writes "What kind of an idiot would buy penis-enlargement pills? Even more idiotic, who would buy them from a spammer? Apparently LOTS of people, according to this article at Wired. The operators of a spamvertised order site left their customer logs exposed. There were 6,000 orders for the pills since July 4. Sayeth Wired: "Do the math and you begin to understand why spammers are willing to put up with the wrath of spam recipients, Internet service providers and federal regulators.""

Comments

Always wondered...

[RobertB-DC]

... I had always wondered if anyone would actually buy from a spammer.

Any chance the spammer did a media honeypot? Released fake records to make marketers *think* he was successful?

The problem that just won't go away.

[Sheetrock]

My Hotmail account has been filling up regularly with spam like this for years, and I always wondered not only who the hell would buy something like this from someone they didn't know but also why people who are dumping hundreds of thousands of messages an hour through a network aren't having their connections terminated. You know the drill; everybody's got an abuse policy, but apparently abuse@whatever.com is routed to the Recycle Bin.

Despite my vehement loathing of spam, a recent incident is making me question how we go about dealing with it. Recently, Something Awful has been having issues with the SPEWS list, a popular spam blacklister, who according to Something Awful blacklisted a whole chunk of IP addresses that happened to include their own unabused server without offering recourse or explanation simply because it had the misfortune of sharing address space unknowingly and unwillingly. I'd call that overkill, and more offensive than the perceived problem of spam itself if truth be told. Bayesian filters work, so why do we need to continue inadvertently censoring netizens who have nothing to do with spamming?

I tell you, folks, after reading this article and hearing about what anti-spam proponents have come up with for solutions, I'm starting to have second thoughts about the whole deal. For me it comes down to to the freedom of speech issue -- I've always been told that if you can't handle free speech you don't agree with you obviously can't handle free speech -- and I suppose just because something irritates me doesn't mean that the greater good would be served by silencing that something.

Another perspective is that the amount of money being pumped back into the economy by so-called unsolicited commercial e-mail is nothing to scoff at, and perhaps legislating it in some tolerable form such as limiting a company to one commercial message per person per day would create a new legitimate business method in this country. It's something to think about, certainly. I'd hate to think we're going to lose another revenue stream to outsourcing before we've even had a chance to give it a go locally, and this may be a way for us to recapture some of those IT jobs that have been lost and generate a whole new crop of successful entrepeneurships.

Re:Lesser of two evils

[yorkrj]

At least telemarketing provides jobs.

Spam provides jobs too in that someone has to write the filter programs so that we are saved from having to manually delete one more fsking spam.