Slashdot Mirror
Study on the Effects of Spam on End Users
An anonymous reader writes "'About a third of people responded to a spam, seeking more information. And 7 percent actually bought a product or service.' Who are these people? Is this really what non-techies do with Spam? They can have my Spam if they want it :-)"
One problem is people ignoring email that isn't spam, simply because the subject line looks like it it. It may change the way subject lines are written. In the end, I think email will be like IM, you'll have to 'approve' what email you'll accept, like you have to 'approve' additions to your buddy list now. This will take away much of the openness and functionality of email, so I hope it doesn't come to that.
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
Hopefully we'll soon be able to study the effects of legal measures on spammers. :)
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
My provider just installed it. : .
Now, the spam comes with a modified subject (beginning with *****SPAM*****) and a report such as
SPAM: . : . . : . : . . Start SpamAssassin results . : . . : . : .
SPAM: This mail is probably spam. The original message has been altered
SPAM: so you can recognise or block similar unwanted mail in future.
SPAM: See http://spamassassin.org/tag/ for more details.
SPAM:
SPAM: Content analysis details: (6.4 hits, 3 required)
SPAM: Hit! (2.7 points) Subject contains lots of white space
SPAM: Hit! (3.7 points) BODY: Information on getting a larger penis
SPAM:
SPAM: . : . . : . : . . End of SpamAssassin results . : . . : . : . .
Now, I'd suggest you ask your provider to install such a filter on his servers.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I've got my Dad well trained... he usually blocks anything that's not from a user in his address book, and deletes anything with an attatchment that he was not expecting. He's not exactly a techie, but he's a lot more savvy than a lot of non-technical internet users
My mom on the other hand, still seems to believe that it's all personally directed at her, and that she should either respond, get angry/offended/whatever, just as if someone she knew in meatspace said/sent it to her. :-)
She's learning, now, but quite often she looks at stuff like those banner ads saying "Speed up your internet connection..." or "You have won..." and she's just not worked out yet that it's all lies. The worst are those emails which claim it's a new critical update from Microsoft. It took ages to convince her that Bill's Boys don't send out neccesary updates through email.
It's the folk who don't have a reality check in the form of a friendly techie around that I'm worried about. If not for me, my folks PC would be riddled with trojans, virii and other malicious software.
-- Soluzar
Sign the FSF's Anti-DMCA petit
I'm rolling my own.
I'm setting up my own Email server (yes, paid the extra bucks to get a business broadband account), complete with filters, attachment blocking, etc. Even purchased and read a couple of books on the subject... it's proven to be quite an educational endeavor.
When my kids are old enough to use Email (pretty soon now), I want to provide them with something at least partially filtered by dear old dad... I' ve even saved about 2000 spam emails to help train the filters. I don't want to have the birds-and-the-bees conversation with my kids any earlier than I have to (and explaining some midgets-in-leather porno spam is NOT on my preferred activities list).
Doing something is so much better than just bitching, and so much more satisfying.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
Take my Dad, for example. He's happy keeping in touch with his operatic society via their mailing list, and using email - you forget how big a "Wow!" moment you had when you first got your head around the whole idea of free global communications - but he's still printing out the latest "MS Security Patch" fakes and asking me if he needs to do anything with them.
He also keeps asking if there's anything I can do to stop the semi-porn spam - and other than the usual precautions, the answer is still "not really".
It may be natural to us old pros to just hit delete, but to people new to the technology it's not that straightforward.
People think it's polite to mail back saying "actually, I don't want this mail" rather than LARTing them to the ISP, looking up their address from WHOIS, burning down their house and sowing the ground with salt like we do (it's not just me doing this, is it?
Basically, there are always going to be enough people making enough mistakes whilst learning to keep spammers happy...
Mind you, anyone who buys a Penis Patch probably deserves all they get!
this report says that 33% of users have "clicked on a link" in order to find out more, sometime in their lives, and 7% of users have ordered something from a spam message at some point. (At least I interpreted the blurb to mean that some spam had a 7% return rate -- that's not the case.) I don't think that these numbers are really all that surprising. For a beginning internet user, spam may seem like no more than commercials on TV. It shouldn't be surprising that occasionally people get interested.
Much more interesting would be a survey of the last time they responded or bought something from spam, versus how long they have been using e-mail. You could draw more conclusions from that.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
You say that but when I joined the company I'm at now we had a much worse SPAM problem than we do currently. The company's small and the budget wasn't there for proper filtering so I thought I may as well try removing myself from lists. Surprisingly the only e-mails I still get are for Viagra or penis enlargement, all the others have stopped. So yeah I still have to use my filters, but they're doing a lot less work.
Go to spamcop.net and click on "report spam". It parses the headers for you, sends the reports, and uses the report to build up a pattern of abuse. Doesn't charge for the reporting service. I use them to filter my personal email; they clean the inbox & deliver the contents to where I want it...that takes a subscription,but reporting is free.
Our company maintains web sites for a number of clients. We frequently get clients forwarding us spam that they have received, saying things like "your web site is not optimized for search engines", "why aren't you in this great directory...?", "your web site would recieve a lot more visitors if...", asking us what we should do about it.
It can be a bit annoying, because of course clients don't understand these things are just spam sent out in their thousands, and think they are from real people criticising their web sites. Of course the standard Slashdot response is to laugh at such people for being dumb, but often this type of spam is created in a deliberately deceptive way to make it look as if it is from a real person.
I see this as more toothless-tiger feel-good legislation that politicians sign to get votes. I for one don't buy it for a second.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
You never saw a fish on the wall with its mouth shut.
A sense of peace? Please share how you arrived there?
That little realization is really scary to me. I don't FEEL above average. Actually I feel I could be a hell of a lot smarter. My IQ is above 150, and I'm well educated. (It's not bragging from an "anonymous handle" is it?) Yet I feel dumb often.
Which makes me feel fairly hopeless to think about your 'realization'. There are many people under 100, marginally educated, who are: driving, voting, holding office, raising children, listening to Rush Limbaugh, purchasing firearms... OMG !! If I sometimes wonder if I'm properly qualified to do all those things...
Not to mention the loneliness.
Excuse me now I have to go purchase a small island and fortify it.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
You separate into groups; the response group R, and the "Fuck off" group F. Say that F is 1000 people or so; you now take a subsample of F, say 20 people, and you harass them at all hours of the day until they give you a straight answer. You then assume that the 20 people you randomly chose to harass in this manner are representative of the entire 1000, and multiply the ratio accordingly.
Of course, most surveyors don't have the nerve to do the statistical analysis properly, and frankly I can't say I blame them.
I agree the figures sound high, but we are in statistics land..
1. People may receive mailings from a company they once did business with, offering them worthwhile products. But if they've forgotten about their original dealings, it will look like UCE.
2. Some (otherwise) reputable companies may get hold of a targetted mailing list and send spam that is actually not for sex aids and scams. I've seen a few 'honest' spams in my time.
3. People like me follow links in spams simply out of curiosity. If I get an unusually novel one, or one displaying new techniques in stealth, I often (carefully) investigate it.
-----
There is a large group of people with IQs of 100, so fewer than half are less than 100. In a normal distribution (bell curve) median, mean & mode are at the same point. IQ tests are constructed to fit the normal distribution, so for IQ tests:
100 is the most common value, or the Mode.
100 is the midpoint of the values, or Median.
100 is the average value or Mean.
If you're talking about something without a normal distribution, then extreme values on one side will drive the average down, but most of the population is above average.
In Lake Wobegone, "All the children are above average." Maybe they have a lot of terribly stupid adults, so that all the children can be above average. I knew something bothered me about that place.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
I guess we should stop trying to make laws to stop spam. If it were something like 5% of responded to a spam message and 0.01% actually bought something, I could see the argument for illegalizing it. However, a figure this high suggests that people actually want these offers (I haven't a clue why, either, so don't ask).
Maybe this is better as I would much rather have spam than DRM, and it appears spam has been used as one of the arguments in favor of locking down the Net.
I would rather suffer the inconvenience of freedom than the frustrated meaninglessness of life under tyranny.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
I remember I got a spam from a company called Revolution Helicopters. I was so intrigued by the concept that I emailed them saying they really shouldn't spam but their product was interesting.
They emailed me back, saying the company will never do this again since the response was so hostile, and they had learned their lesson!
I was curious, so just now I did a search for the company. They are not in business anymore, but people are still using and maintaining the product.
So I have technically responded to a spam, but I never actually bought anything from one.
D