Slashdot Mirror
How the Spam Industry is Sustained
mOoZik writes "The BBC has an interesting article about spam and why it's still around. According to a survey, nearly 1/3 of users have clicked on spam messages and 1/10 have bought products advertised therein. "If no-one responded to junk e-mail and didn't buy products sold in this way, then spam would be as extinct as the dinosaurs.""
That's an average right? Because I can't see how 10% of people have bought stuff from spam. I think that guy who likes buying spam stuff is driving the average up.
"The list of words most commonly hidden by the spammers from anti-spam software reveals that most spam is about the old favourites: money, drugs and sex," said Mr Cluley.
and my mortgage has never been longer or harder.
Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em
But what ratio have received the $43M from an fallen African state?
Omnis amans amens
That should really be one third of people who choose to respond to telephone calls to answer surveys. I think that is a substantial skew in their results right there.
The clue by four is gonna get a workout tomorrow.
"Researchers to investigate why they were the last to figure this out."
could there really be that many people out there desiring... enlargement?
Let's hang the spammers then hang the people who click on the spam links. Or at least put them all in a ghetto in southern Italy.
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
Graham Cluley [says] "If no-one responded to junk e-mail and didn't buy products sold in this way, then spam would be as extinct as the dinosaurs."
Well, duh. That could be said for any type of advertising.
The article says 1 in 10 people buy stuff from spam.
This is an average of course. Slashdot obviously isn't the average, but it's still likely SOME of you have bought something from spam (even if it's 1 in 100 slashdotters).
So fess up. Whose being buying stuff from spam?
I've recently taken a job at a small software company and occcasionally I have to take a support call or two. We deal with school districts and our software is used primarily by special education administrators.
These are people with multiple master's degrees and I'm amazed every day by their lack of techno-savvy. If very bright highly educated people don't recognize pop-up windows as advertisements then how can we expect the "average" person to recognize the bigger issue surrounding spam?
I think the fact is that most people really don't care that much. They just accept spam the same way they accept junk snail-mail.
That's what I call small penis syndrome. I mean, what else could you buy from those 'ads'???
new bill nye show here
The vast majority of spam that I get is targeted at Americans, and hence completely irrelevent to me.
I wonder if the number of people that "have clicked on" and "have bought from" is much higher in the US than in other countries.
If we stand still it won't see us. But then we would have to deal with the raptors and you can't just ignore a raptor because they can see you even if you're standing still. So no matter what the dinosaurs will probably take over
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. Add Bunny to your signature
(> <) to help him achieve world domination.
So everyone is annoyed by spam... at least any person I've talked to in the last few years who has email... yet apparently a very significant portion support it.
Wonderful.
This is what causes me to lament the state of humanity. There are some tried and true methods of persuation and propaganda, none of these methods are secret. Yet they work, a disturbing percentage of the time. Why can't we learn from ourselves?
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Not to split fucking hairs, but "bought" sort of implies that they actually got something. Defrauded, maybe, not goddamn bought. /Hates the BSA, but would like them to start smacking the "buy software now" spams.
.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Fine, but those who are actively blocking it will neither click nor buy. They're wasting bandwidth.
they ought to do with spam what they did to test the theory in the last slashdot article
Dinosaurs are extinct? Damn, and I just bought two velociraptors from a guy from Nigeria.
Anyone ever see at the bottom of your spam messages something like "Click here to unregister your e-mail address"? I checked out the URL it pointed to once and I can't find it now (it was something like nomorespam.org) where it asks you to enter your e-mail address so you can be taken off spam lists.
Did anyone ever actually try that to see if their spam got reduced? I didn't, because (1) Why would spammers voluntarly reduce the size of the audience they reach out to when not legally enforced? and (2) The site is likely a dupe and serves the opposite purpose: to let spammers know about your e-mail and, more importantly, that it's being actively used. I'm just curious if anyone found this "service" to actually be legit/effective.
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
I have to wonder how the survey question was phrased.
If it gave an accurate and easily understandable description of SPAM (e.g. "email from someone you had not contacted in any way or did not know how they got your email address"), it would be fine.
But I have a feeling (having taken a few surveys in my day) that it was something more along the lines of "How many times in the past year did you buy a product after receiving an email about the product?"
The problem there is that it covers legitimate email offers, like from Amazon, ThinkGeek, or whatever. People might even have thought it counted when they were emailed a confirmation for their purchase.
I wish these articles would include a link to the survey.
I did not need to click on anything to have the spammers generate traffic - all I had to do was to setup a honeypot, then advertise an email address "having used" the honeypot through Newsgroups (actually my research related to much more than that, but this is a /. simplification), then identify test messages, to let them through and let spammers believe that my honeypot is in fact an open proxy - and in 11 hrs I got a few GB of spam running to my "open proxy", allowing me to study it. I have never let it out of my box, but it definitely gave the spammers adrenaline enough to keep them around for longer ... and they are still pounding my box, one year after the end of the project, and from allowing their test messages go through, and half a year since the domain whom the box belonged to, expired. Is anybody still wondering about spammers longevity?!?
== With enough Will Power, one could move mountains. With enough Brains, one would just leave them where they are ==
Unless "click on" means got tricked into clicking on and "buy" means accidentally got further along in the (ahem) "ordering process." I don't believe it for a second.
Sometimes I think the dolts who actually buy from spammers are as odious as the spammers themselves. The ten percent figure is astonishingly high. But then there's just as much room at the left-hand side of the bell-shaped curve as there is on the right hand side.
Insert witty sig here.
I'm writing a virus.
It will randomly generate mortgage/penis enlargement/teen sluts/housewives/OEM Software spam.
It will have a "Click here to respond" link.
If you click the link, it wipes your hard drive and somehow sets your computer on fire. I need to work out how to kill the CPU fan or something...
These people who are responding to spam need to have their computers confiscated, for great justice.
That is all.
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
Ok, I have to know who these guys were surveying, because I'm inclined to think it was the population of a mental institution.
I really have to disagree with TFA on this one. I don't think it's "bad email behavior" keeping spam alive (viruses are a different matter, but lumped in together).
It's the stupid and unethical businesses who will pay a spammer $100 for a 200,000 user spam blast. The spammer doesn't give a rat's posterior whether or not the victim buys or clicks. All he cares about is not getting bounced. Then he gets paid.
"If no-one responded to junk e-mail and didn't buy products sold in this way, then spam would be as extinct as the dinosaurs."
This is a very simplistic view. It assumes that people measure their results carefully, and that it's the same people who keep selling. There's plenty of marketing channels out there that have a poor return on investment, but they keep alive for other reasons. Such reasons include: people don't measure the success properly, there's a new sucker born every minute, or other less financial reasons.
For instance, I had a friend who used to sell sponsorship to big golf tournaments. Companies would pay huge somes of money, and there was plenty of data around that there was a lousy ROI. They kept doing it because they wanted the perks - the premium positions & champagne, etc. He said in his few years, only saw one company actually utilise their investment well by tying it in with other promotions.
In the case of spam, it may possibly be true that it is profitable - it does appear to be the same people advertising all the time - but don't assume staying in business = good medium.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
I hear you on that. I've felt great since I decided to refinance my...kneecap *ahem*. Seriously, though, I'm often amazed at how ignorant the general public can be about Spam and junk emails. I understand that some spammers are very good at what they do, but doesn't it just make you lose faith in humanity knowing that someone, somewhere, has chosen to actually open a message titled something like "drew S0MMA, V1AAGRRA, V1C0DD1N, C1AAL1S, \/ALLIUM, XANAA, C0DE1NE, Z0LOFT AT L0W somewhere end!!!!". Wow.
Probably understated because guys who buy those pills probably don't own up to it. Especially people who get taken are less likely to admit, so it's probably a bit higher percentage.
Personally, I refuse to buy anything via spam and don't even open the stuff. Anyone who will resort to such unethical mode of advertising is not to be trusted in any case.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
He won't admit that he bought anything; we're at the "Do not ask"/"Do not tell" level now. Nobody wants to admit they were an idiot. Kind of takes the edge off of being the wise old parent role.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
to educate users. If somebody signs up for a free-mail account (could work for ISPs in general as well), they are automatically send a couple of fake spams. If any link in the spam-emails is clicked, the account of the user will be closed (with an educational warning message). That will teach them...
Credit: Some MS guy I talked to. Unfortunately Hotmail-management was kinda opposed to that idea...
I used to say that spammers should be put to death, meaning it as hyperbole. But then I considered how many person-seconds are wasted by a single spam campaign, and reconsidered. One spam campaign can waste several human lifetimes. So the death penalty actually seems justifiable, at least as much as it is for other capital crimes.
haha,
you actually believe that the dinosaurs are extinct?
oh man, no wonder people are such suckers for spam.
ôó
2 words: Spam Vampire
It works if you tke the time to do it. I got all of my friends together and we made a collective one. We hit some sites so badly that they are DoSd.
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
Reguardless of how effective spam ads may be, that doesn't excuse them from modifying the spam so that the people running filters still have to see it. If you're filtering spam, you not only don't want to buy anything from them, you don't want to even see it. I've been training spambayes for months now, and some stuff still gets through as 0% spam. Those are the people who need to be shut down, its easy enough to ignore the rest.
In Korea only old people buy items advertised in SPAM.
So, given the thousands (tens of thousands?) of spam I've recieved, I've clicked on the link from one. Suddenly 1 in 10,000 doesn't look as good as 1 in 3.
Of course, the real way that spam is funded is through scams (which only need a minute click-through rate) and by convincing one company after another that the click-through rate isn't minute. The recipients aren't the only ones being scammed.
I've always wondered why we , as a community,
don't beat them at their own game. There is
more of us then them, so if only 10% of us
would carpet bomb them with fake requests,
calling their 800 numbers, whatever they
want back, wouldn't that piss them off.
In fact, you start with one company
(my current favorite is Gevalia Coffee,
who can't stop mailing me despite repeated
phone calls and email requests, they hired
a 3rd party to "spam"), and work you way down
slowly and methodically. THat will teach normal
companies to stop doing it.
There probably are a few hard cases to crack,
but it seems there aren't all that many companies
around who do it.
Well... I'm STILL waiting on my f_re3 V.iagra. Will it ever come?
Just like we have a right to visit web pages unsuitable for young children, which also wouldn't exist if nobody visited them. So those of us who can't stand spam would also have to use software like cybernanny to filter the Internet, rather than banning advertisements that apparently find many willing targets.
Now before you all start on the "Yeah, I have a 11" penis and 36DDD breasts!" take a look at some of the spam you get. Seriously, look at a lot of it.
producttestpanel.com is a good example. Spams for discount cruises from travel companies. Spam for free movie tickets (yes, I worked for the company that did that!) and spam for other free/discount products. It's not all porn & pills. in fact, the spammers I worked for adamantly refused to send out mails for porn or pills, but "$50 Gift Cards!" and "Try our coffee samples!" were ok.
This is a *huge industry* - some of these companies were sending us checks for $60,000 per month to blast out emails.
CAN-SPAM definitely has NOT helped. I believe that it has made the problem much worse, and it's just going to get worse until that POS law is repealed.
If no-one responded to junk e-mail and didn't buy products sold in this way, then spam would be as extinct as the dinosaurs.
Alternatively, if we just buy everything they can offer, they will have nothing to sell no more, the spam will go extinct too.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
How the Spam Industry is Sustained
GOD, ISN'T OBVIOUS BY NOW??!?!?! Was I somehow teleported back to 1990 when this was actually news or am I reading slashdot?!? HELP MEEEE!!!
You need a FREE iPod Nano
People buy crap from spam?!? ok, fine, but why cant the morons that buy this junk, and the scammers that sell it just get together and leave the rest of us in peace?
Why do they have to constantly try to get around filters, steal resources, forge headers etc?
Ideally there would be an isolated island or small rock in the depths of outer space that these people could go and do their 'business' on, and leave the rest of us alone.
bah.
air and light and time and space
Okay, so maybe the study's basic methodology and findings are questionable.
.igu--ess.th*ey..al*re-ady.doo
But I think the main point is that if nobody actually bought stuff from spammers, they would have no reason to expend their resources for their devilish cabal.
To tell you the truth, when you think of someone who buys from a spammer, what age is the person in your mental image?
Are they young, computer-savy, next-generation type people? Or are they old farts that don't know any better?
And if age is exciting, think of some other choice demographics of naivete.
Just from age, though, I think that in a few years the number of spammers will decrease considerably because the number of FREAKING RETARDS (okay, I got it out--feel better now) who buy from spammers will also decrease.
And considering the huge push to filter and otherwise block spammers, coupled with the "old fart factor," I think we can see less spam in our forecast.
That is, unless the spammers manage to stay ahead of the technological curve of the filters--oh crap,
http://augustwestproducts.i8.com
You'd have to a total idiot to believe you could get one without painful scars or cancer-causing drugs, sure, but even a self-confident and intelligent man can want to be way beyond average.
Look, wives don't stay virgins for long. Sometimes wives even give birth. Yeah, that's right, a giant 10-pound (4.5 kg) baby might streach the love hole to cosmic proportions. After she's streached to over 4" (10 cm) diameter for a respectably-sized baby, a MASSIVE PENIS starts looking useful.
I guess I'm average, or maybe a tad more, but that doesn't mean I'd dislike having a MASSIVE PENIS if I could get one! 2" (5 cm) diameter please, comfortably usable 7 times per day.
"I've always wondered how eunuchs sound in bed, so can I do you next?" They probably keep asking what the definition of "is" is, as they ponder the Road Ahead.
C|N>K
www.419eater.com
Thats where they scam the scammers. Damn funny site to read.
>"If no-one responded to junk e-mail and didn't buy products sold in this way, then spam would be as extinct as the dinosaurs."
Wow! These brits are geniuses!
Must-not-watch TV!
The article called it "bad email behavior". Can't we just call it like it is? It's "stupid people".
Only an idiot would think that v1agRA or home mortgages should be bought through email.
--- witty signature
Spam is an economic problem and requires an economic solution.
This story focuses on one side of it, but the amount of profit is *NOT* the problem as long as the spammers think they can divide by zero as far as the costs are concerned. Email is not and never has been free, but by designing SMTP to pretend email is free, spam is the inevitable result. If the spammer thinks another 10 million spams cost nothing, but will possibly find one more sucker to send in $39.95, then the RoI looks infinite. BROKEN economic model!
The only option that will solve the spam problem is a sound economic approach that puts a non-zero cost on each email message. I think that could be done by requiring prepaid postage. I don't know about you, but I would certainly opt in for a system that was absolutely guaranteed not to get any mass-of-stinkage spam. (This could be done transparently and compatibly with the existing SMTP email system.)
Once you have a real economic model, then you can add all the bells and whistles, and actually I have nothing against legitimate advertising from legitimate companies--as long as I control the flow and especially if I can target what I receive. In particular, I'd like a system that would let advertisers bid for my time. Something like "I'll accept a small amount of advertising email, and I'm interested in these products. What's it worth to you to reach me?" By small in this context, I'd be measuring it in terms of time, say 15 minutes per day where each worthwhile ad will probably take 1 minute to read.
The email service provider would have some of my personal information to help "market" my valuable time. However, it would be strongly in their interest to carefully safeguard my anonymity, since leaking my personal information would destroy their own value. Also, since they would be getting a percentage of the take, it would of course be in their interest to maximize the advertising-related revenue I'd receive for those few ads.
However, none of this is possible without a REAL economic model underlying email.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
10% of people buying things from spam e-mails does seem like a lot... but not all spam is Herbal Viagra and Mortgages. I wonder if they're classifying purchases from mailing lists from "respectable" online stores in that figure. For example, if I'm on an ebgames.com mailing list because I've purchased there before, and I get an ad for a sale in my e-mail from them, and buy based on that ad, does that count?
Perhaps the best way to fight spam is a public campaign about not responding to it. And if that doesn't work, threats on people's lives could also work. Or maybe blame it on making children starve to death in some remote country. I suspect there is some critical mass that is required to keep it going.
See the cpuburn code.
VA Linux has a system test tool that is known for
setting systems on fire. Unfortunately it only runs
on Linux. Older systems clogged with dust should be
quite vulnerable to this. I don't remember the name
exactly, but it was some mythical thing like Hydra
or Chimera.
But you should see the SIZE of my penis!!!!
Wow... somebody bashes Bush and you bring up a Clinton joke from the last century? Brilliant. Absolutely Brilliant. It's not wonder the Republicans are taking over, you're just too sharp for me...
Some people have very low sales resistance. They don't really want the spam (and opt to block it if possible), but once presented with it they have little willpower.
It's scary and sad and unfortunately true.
DNA just wants to be free...
1. Send spam to everyone with link to product.
2. Anyone that buys product will be killed by said product after receiving it.
3. ???
4. Profit
I've posted it before and you've given me the opportunity to post it again.
I'm usually not in favor of the death penalty. However, not only am I in favor of the electric chair for spammers; I'd replace the switch with a dial. After rigourous (and fun I might add) trials on the many spammers it would be marked like this:
1. Mildly painful
2. hurts
3. really stings
4. excruciating
5. probable fatality
6. likely fatality
11. human boooowwwwbeeeecue
There's hours of fun to be had as mail admins take turns lovingly sweeping the dial from 1 to 4. The mail admins will of course charge admission to mail recipients.
The child porn purveyors can get the special wire that goes in the pants.
Yeah, it really is a "not wonder", eh?
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
I don't believe that stat, i bet they included email from companies you've previously done business with - eg amazon special offers etc.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Aha! The Republicans are simply Grammer Nazi's in disguise... wait... nevermind about the disguise part...
1) If 1/3 of the users click on spam, that means that even if the spam filters on all the major servers/clients let 66% of the spam through, the user would have to click on ~50% of those spam mails.
2) If 1 in 10 users made the purchases? Have they have outdone google's ad model?
I suspect these numbers are reported by folks in the spam industry to project better success metrics and lure in more clients.
-- Binary Finary
1 in 10 isn't hard to believe, but it really depends on what we define as 'buying from spam' and what exactly this survey is defining as spam. In my own judgement, if I try a software product and later decide to buy it from a follow-up email, I wouldn't consider that buying from spam, but did this survey consider marketing like that to be spam? To understand the accuracy of the study we have to know the parameters they set. According to this survey: 1. What is considered spam? 2. What is considered "buying from spam"? (i.e. how direct must the link between the spam and the purchase be?) 3. How large was the survey group?
This is another effect of the same universal problem that has affected all of human civilization since history began, and manifests itself most obviously in politics. Namely:
A couple of evil/manipulative/powerful people can take the vast hordes of stupid/gullible/trusting people and make all sort of problems for the everybody involved, including all those of us who don't fit neatly into either category and often other evil/powerful people as well. Hell, even the evil/powerful ones at the top lose out in the very long term, as civilization (or in this case, the internet) eventually collapses out from underneath them...
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
...the internet would be a much quieter place.
I am sure people are buying is what keeps spam alive. I cant see people spending the money, legal mess, and hassle in doing something that isnt making money or just for the hell of it.
The article is just stating the obvious.
It's hard to imagine one can actually buy a spam-advertised product. I don't think I've ever received an unsollicited email message that had any relevance to me, and like most of us I've had quite some spam messages.
I mostly get Chinese spam, or at least I think so. I mean, what am I supposed to do at a page like this at all? Readable spam is about mortgages or pills in the states, or tries to talk me into money scams in Africa...
These people buying spam-stuff must be on way better spam lists ;-)
Yes, and if Astrologers couldn't predict the future no one would believe in Astrology.
And if quacks didn't actually cure people, nobody would buy their 'elixirs of life'.
And if pyramid schemes didn't actually make anyone other than the promoter money, nobody would invest in them.
As PT Barnum said, there is a sucker born every minute
I'm not surprised by the number of people that respond to spam. These are probably the same people who watch current affair programs on the commercial stations (eg ACA and Today Tonight in Australia) and believe that their reports consitute in depth analysis (Why tonight's diet is better than the last 1x10^20 we've shown you).
Read a tabloid (or Murdoch broadsheet), watch the news, listen to the radio, watch political advertising. It's all about appealing to your base instincts (frequently anger) and not your brain.
In my job I've seen the role of media manipulators ("communicators" and "PR people") increase in government and the sciences. The important thing for them is not to provide facts and hard information, but to provide "spin".
People live busy lives - they don't have time to analyse thing closely now (or so we are told). Even those great doubters of everything, the university students, now have to spend all their spare time in paid jobs instead of pushing the boundries with their outrageous ideals.
Is there any hope for the human race?
What is the inverse of the Matrix?
You can call me a grammer Nazi until Al Gore finally figures he will never be president but the fact remains you criticized Republicans for being stupid and then made a stupid mistake.
As the kids say, joo |053
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
I get almost no spam in Chinese or Korean, but maybe one day in 10 I get spam in Japanese and occasionally I get spam in Hebrew or Russian. Fortunately, the stuff has ISO-standard character-set tags in the From: and Subject: lines (usually both), and since I don't read any of those languages, I can set my spam filters to discard them. It's much less crude than simply discarding anything with a Korean or Chinese IP address or domain name, though on some of my email addresses I do that also.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Those two figures aren't in conflict with each other. You can have a very small response rate per message, but spammers send billions and billions of messages to millions of people, and it's quite possible that 10% of the people have bought at least one thing at least once, even if they ignored thousands of other spams the received.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Damnit! I consider SPAM an affront to my dignity! In addition, I notice that most SPAM is used to promote products of dubious (make that downright bullshit value). Where the hell did these numbers come from?
And, no, I didn't RTFA. My personal experience says this is bullshit! and so is the article!
That's what, 800 people, tops?
How many people use email?
How on earth have they survived? Riots have started over less...
She had some cheerful business cards. Turns out she'd gotten them "free" from a web site she heard about in an email. Of course, the shipping for the 250 "free" cards cost about $7, so she ended up paying about what should would have if she'd gone to a reputable printer. My wife and I looked at each other sadly and decided it wasn't likely to be worth trying to educate her...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
thank you for expressing something i have always thought was blindingly obvious...i guess everyone's blinded by their p.c. anti-market mentality:-(
I am very impressed by your Republican ability to find grammar errors. Please help me become a Republican so that I, too, may find grammatical errors and make tired old jokes.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Potato
Potatoe
That's all I do. I've got most of CHINANET completely blackholed by my server (no IP activity allowed from several Class A subnets), and most of South Korea. Just by doing this, it cut my spam by about 90%. The rest are from zombies, but they're easy enough to catch in Thunderbird's spam catcher.
If I'm feeling particularly fiesty, I may use SpamVampire to hammer on them for a few days, driving their bandwidth costs through the roof.
But all in all, just block the subnets, and forget about it. If China wants to talk to my server in any way, China's gonna have to fix their spam problem.
That way we know where most of the idiots live in this country. Re-target some of those nukes that we have far to many of here in the US, take out the idiots, and then *MAYBE* we can start making some progress here instead of being dragged back to the 1700s..
By definition, if someone bought something from a spam email, was it really spam in the first place?
I would argue no, because it obviously was desired.
In printed material marketing and cold calling, you usally get 1% to 2% return on all outbound materials. 10% will actually get the spam problem to grow with that kind of return.
A regular 10,000 mailing advertising some service in the range of $200 or even $400 in the case of garage floor recovering WILL get a return on investment.
Just 1% of that 10,000 piece mailing advertising a landscape contract will get at least $2000 in return business offsetting the cost of marketing and gaining a customer.
To come even close in printed material cost vs. email blasts, you'd get millions of email addresses vs thousands and with a 10% return??!?
If you could get 10% of a million vs 1% of 10,000; which one would you market?
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Of course I ignore it. I have dspam.
I actually think commercials are a bigger problem. I don't have a TiVo, and BitTorrent isn't a complete solution yet.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If you aren't annoyed, I dare you to put your email address where your mouth is. Reply with an address.
My guess is you're astroturf -- that you're actually a spammer, and you aren't annoyed because you protect your identity well.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
...and didn't buy products sold in this way, then spam would be as extinct as the dinosaurs.
Man! Talk about repeating the obvious! I can't even remember how many flames I got for stating the exact, same thing. Let's see if people don't start doing it here, also.
What?
80% of the people who voted Republican in 2004 believe that Saddam Hussein personally ordered the September 11th attacks. Only 30% of those who voted Democrat would agree. And now we've found that 10% of people who get spam, buy from it.
A new study conducted by me shows that 95% of the population is clinically retarted, and 100% of the education community. Furthermore, 60% of statistics in this post were made up on the spot, and 100% of the statistics in this paragraph.
The scary part is: the first paragraph is all true.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
How industry Spam is sustained? SEE SIG FOR DETAILS, w00t! w00t!
You need a FREE iPod Nano
people could just use email services that share their ad revenue from page views... Spam me, please - I get paid to open and delete it. BWA-HAHAHA, the spam-fattened troll laughs.
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
All this means is 10% of people who are willing to respond to surveys are willing to buy something advertised by spam. I wonder how they conducted the survey. Perhaps through unsolicited phone calls?
Where else but on /. could a spam discussion elicit Bush-bashing.
Pretty much anywhere else from what I've seen. Try reading message boards at the major news sites. Same thing happens there.
Ok so I take calls on a help desk. and every week or two i get a call from a customer, asking for a special spam request. They start saying I recieved this offsensive spam message. And I have descided I no longer want to receive spam. At this point i find it hard to not laugh. I proceed to tell them we have no control over who sends your emails, we can change your email address if you want. etc etc etc. Sometimes the customer gets incredibly angry that we can't just turn it off, and that we are the ones behind there spam etc. Its not like we dont try, because we run our mail servers with a pretty high anti spam protection with mutliple solutions, only a very small percentage of spam gets though.
Its amazing to me that people compare spam to snail junk mail, and they think its something simiple like a 'no junk mail' sign could suddently make them not receive spam. I recon these are the same people who are buying stuff they receive from spam.
"If no-one responded to junk e-mail and didn't buy products sold in this way, then spam would be as extinct as the dinosaurs."
And if everyone promised that they wouldn't need cranberries on Thanksgiving, every convienence store in the U.S. could be closed. But that aint gonna happen either.
nice ayb pun
Just as sending (spewing) spam, buying from spammers if one is replying to a spam offer should be a criminal offence as well, just as buying contraband is a crime. It would be nice to see some of the resources put into fighting P2P for the MPAA put into fighting spammers and their supporters.
50% voted for Count Chocula.
I thought that was what the Viagr@ was intended for...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
That's all I do. I've got most of CHINANET completely blackholed by my server (no IP activity allowed from several Class A subnets), and most of South Korea. Just by doing this, it cut my spam by about 90%.
o ck .html
I just spent 20 minutes trying to find netblock info and found this list.
http://www.richnetworks.net/spamcontrol/asianbl
Consider chain letters -- no economic benefit,
but they've been around for centuries and are
annoying to recieve. Ancient spam. With the audience that spam gets there's always gonna be a response.
the funny thing is, 1/2 the people who responded to the spam were also members of the religious right.
I think this probly nails it.
Spam *doesn't* work. But there are plenty of companies out there willing to try it and plenty of spammers spinning the numbers right to convince companies to try it.
Spam *does* work for the spammers, but not for anyone else. You're dead on, companies who pay to have spam sent are being scammed and the data to prove it is too hard to sift through, and so it continues.
Spam
is clearly sustained after all this time, because of the layer of jellied fat on the top. I realize all SPAM was canned in 1933, when it was originally invented, so of course some people are mystified that all that SPAM has managed to maintain 'good' up until today... but that jellied fatlayer keeps the spam frozen in time, so it can never go bad.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
One isn't a "user" of spam...
I know of people that have bought stuff through emails that they received aka spam and they all regretted it. Well there are dumb people all over the place and that's why advertisements still exist. Spam is only a name for cheap and nasty new way to distribute junk mail. Well at least I don't get as much junk mail in my real mail box.
In the course of my pre-suit investigation, I did several canary traps. Just one response to one piece of spam resulted in calls from over 40 mortgage brokers. These brokers had paid between $30 and $50 dollars for that lead. They had purchased it from a "lead generator" company who had paid between $20 and $30 dollars, and these companies had in turn bought it from another lead generator company! And I haven't even reached the actual spammer yet.
So, one response to one piece of spam funded an entire chain of companies selling leads, generating well over $1000 in income for various persons. The consumer had parted with no cash...
No Inflation Taxation without Representation
it used to bother me, the spam i mean. and it still does in some ways (like having to worry about false positives), but spam filters are pretty good, considering that most spam is pretty similar.
maybe im lucky, but thats my experience. so selfishly i say....
BAH
--man this is gonna screw my karma even more
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
Maybe you would do well to be apprehended by the punctuation Nazis.
Note: I have no affiliation with Nazis and/or Republicans.
The toad can't burp - and for some reason can't fart either, so it swells up and eventually explodes. --Anonymous Coward
c1@lis? WTF is that?
If you had posted logged in, I would have added some fans (and some foes, but they like democratic underground).
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
- Collect a ton of mail addresses (or buy)
- Go to some obscure foreign country
- buy access to the net from an ISP that doesn't ask too many questions and tolerates spam.
- Send out spam, advertising some kind of new penis enlargement pills or such.
- Collect orders.
- Send out cyanide-based pills instead. By normal snail-mail, this gives you a few days.
- Collecting cash optional.
- Leave the "sale" website with a message "We will do this again, and you won't know where or when". Explain this could be done with other products, not only pills.
- Make sure this gets to the press.
- Wipe tracks, hide.
- If necessary, repeat once.
Estimated single-time cost: under $5000. Estimated spam level reduction: 95%.
as a motive for responding to SPAM.
Boss tells Humble Worker, "Don't respond to that SPAM! And, especially, don't click on that link!".
Response from Humble Worker:
After the Boss walks away, "CLICK!!!"!!!
Thank you. I needed another dose of irony.
I don't know the company's name - but I used to get lots of spam for business card printing back when I met her. It's mostly been replaced by other things, or drowned out in the other spam, or successfully filtered, or whatever, but I don't think the print shop my company's bureaucrats contract with charges more than $8-10, and the cards are good quality. I don't get to design my own - they've got our logo in one bluish color and a few lines of black text on white cardstock, and it's probably my corporate IT department that did the web form that didn't let me put a PGP key along the bottom the last time I tried.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I've been saying this for years. If people didn't buy from the spammers, they'd have no income and go away and annoy us in some other way.
Or would that merely increase identity theft as they move onto the next target ???
How can something be as extinct as the dinosaurs? Are there different levels of extinctness? Can one thing be just 50% as extinct as another? :)
I'm not a Republican and I have never voted for a Republican.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Isn't it obvious that the apparently random strings thrown in supposedly to defeat spam filters are actually coded terrorist communications?
Hiding signal in the noise is the game: 100 000 people get the spam, and traffic analysis will never pin down the actual intended recipient.
These are Americans we are talking about. If they got 50% bigger, most of them would collapse under their own gravitational pull.
250m American blackholes in Blackburn, Oklahoma. Now they know how many American blackholes it takes to fill the Albert Hall
No sharp objects, I'm a programmer!
Oooh! A bigger penis! Just what I was looking for! I'll take 300! Here is my credit card number, no my bank account number!
SIGFAULT
1/3 of jokes get modded OT. If you get the joke, mod 1 in 3 insightful/interesting/underrated to restore karma balance.
If you think spam is only V14GR4 ads, it's easy to think most people won't ever buy anything from spammers.
But in Argentina, for example, most of the spam I get is from people selling pirated software. And I must tell you, a LOT of times I've received mails offering programs I needed and didn't want to buy.
The only reason why I didn't buy anything is that I don't want to feed the spammer business. But I really wouldn't expect everybody to do the same.
All I can say is that this is more ill advised .gov.uk mouthpiece.
FUD from the
As people I know in the legit email industry
would tell you response rates for legitimate
opt-in lists (existing opted in customers)
are only ~7% or so on average - infrequently
more but often far less.
This percentage is often determined
by comparing known read emails to
respondees. Many people who use a decent
MUA will not be included in the prior but
may be included in the latter.
Hell even subscription lists such as the
sendmail (www.sendmail.org) lists are telling
people that they are getting lots of AS bounces
for people who confirmed opt in so just getting
your message to 10% of confirmed opt-in'ers
is a job these days.
Lies, damn lies, statistics and BBC facts.
Jacqui
For the longest time, my wife thought that she had to select the message in order to junk it, so even though she didn't actually read anything the spammer still heard his link bugs go off.
:-)
(I never had that problem. Chalk up another victory for Pine's superior style of interaction.
A broker typically makes one per cent of a successful mortgage. Soemtimes the applicant pays, or when money is flush, the lender pays. So paying $20-$50 a lead is not too bad.
Opt-in used to mean that I have chosen to receive something. Now it means that I haven't yet chosen *not* to receive something.
I'm sorry, that's a bit like saying that robbery is ok until the victim says "stop". Of course you have to use specific language and send it to an address that that may or may not exist and, oh, incidentally, it could take up to six months to process...
One time a spam message made it past my filters, and in the half second prior to marking it spam (which would thus delete it), I saw a reference to a product that I remembered I'd been meaning to get for a while. Left mouse button already clicked down, I dragged it away from the trash icon prior to releasing it. I examined the link, and it appeared to be a referrer link to a fairly reputable merchant that evidently hasn't yet noticed that when you get a bunch of hits from one referrer that don't actually have an http referrer, you're probably doing business with a spammer. I then went to a different merchant's website and ordered the product.
Did spam actually do something useful? No. If all the time I've had to spend over the years dealing with spam had instead been spent doing more useful things, I probably would have noticed this product and purchased it long ago.
A lot of people seem to think that on those rare occasions that spam advertises something appealing that it's okay to purchase from that marketer. It's not. That marketer is a drag on your time, bandwidth, disk space, and the economic interests of legitimate marketers, and happened to get fantastically lucky. But what about their discount prices? Unless the deal is a fraud (which it often is) you can usually do as well or better searching froogle, overstock.com, ebay, etc., and spending less time on the effort than it takes to read your spam.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
If we could add a clause that says "no cruel and unusual punishment" cannot be applied to spammers... Then we can publically string these bastids up via their bawls and publicaly flog them... do this to one spam king and watch teh rest disappear overnight.
...with topics like these, why WOULDN'T I want to click on the links in spam messages?
pr0n!
V1@gra
Refinance your home at a LOWER interest rate!
Win a free iPod!
Order tobacco products online and receive a 10% discount!!!
0rder Ad0be Ph0t0sh0p on CD for only $10!!!!!!!
Increase your bust size!
Buy Omaha Steaks online and receive free wine!
Banned #1 DVD Copy Program - Get It While You Can
Free online virus scanner. Click here!
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
A while back I saw a Wall Street journal article about a real waste of oxygen, a New York city man who not only didn't mind SPAM, he looked forward to it as a kid or retard would enjoy tearing through junk mail. He also bought many things through SPAM, and responded to it regularly. Just one of these guys will make up for 1000 normal people who just hit delete. I'm sure that's just what the SPAMmers bet on.
Owen Gilmore, MSI Packaging
In an episode of the NBC show "Medical Investigations" several weeks ago, (it might get re-run at least once before the network cancels the show) the B plot involved a girl who had bought some "all natural diet pills" online and received tapeworm eggs. (And then had a tapeworm, which had to be killed off)
They didn't specify whether it was spam, they just said that she bought it "off this website". But it could have been spam.
Some women like getting poked in the cervix.
Some women hate it. Some women can be either way,
depending on what part of the cycle they're in.
So I guess longer is better, because you can always
leave part out if she wants it shallow, but that's
kind of unsatisfying for the guy.
Thus: add adjustable length to the wish list
Yes, and you have to opt out from each robber
separately. The procedures are all different too.
Bush was voted int he first time because his brother Jeb fixed the votes by having Oliphant in power and allowing thousands of votes get tossed out, the second time was due to use of Diebold machines which in a released internal memo, had stated that they gaurentee the republican parties a win.
Do some fucking research before waving that fucking stupid flag.
Most people are not Slashdot users or spam activists. Most people have never spent a second trying to define spam. Anything that's promotional and they don't want is "junk".
My wife signed up in several places to receive info about San Diego before we visited the place last month. Now we're back, and just this week I noticed that she received one of those email newsletters from a tourist board or something similar. She said she really doesn't need them any more, so I suggested she unsubscribes, so she immediately clicked the "Junk Mail" button in the webmail interface.
What this shows is that eduated people such as my wife (she's a surgeon) don't understand a thing about spam. From her point of view she gets promotional email, and if she doesn't want it there's a button that's supposed to somehow make it so that she doesn't get future deliveries of the same stuff. She doesn't understand the consequences of this action (such as feeding incorrect info into the statistical tools that remove spam for all Hotmail users, or perhaps inclusion of the sender to blacklists that affects their communication woth other recipients). For her it's just mail she wants or mail she decided she doesn't want. (BTW, she gets almost no real spam in her Hotmail account. She gets lots of promotional stuff that she subscribed to, such as online bookstores she really buys from, and providers of professional information).
I described just one case, but I think this is the typical case: most people never spent a second thinking about what spam is, and this explains the 10% (or 3%) figures.
Actually the people I am talking about use "opt in" to mean the recipients pay to be included on the mailing list - when thye get bounces it means they failed to provide a contracted service :-(
Is there a cite for this memo? That sounds like good stuff. A link or something? Thanks !
I find this survey utterly ridiculous. Either the survey is completely flawed or it's an outright fabrication created and circulated by people who have something to gain from making congress think people want and like spam.
Not even Superbowl commercials get that kind of return, and we love those!
I'm surprised this even got Slashdot time... I may need to cancel my subscription. I'm loosing faith.
The article indicated that the result was shocking. I worked for a company that was competing against direct mail. A good response rate for direct mail was 2-4% (thats "response" as in "mails something back). Now, I suppose there is less "friction" involved in clicking on a link, but the notion that spam is orders of magnitude more effective then direct mail sets off the warning bells. It doesn't pass the "smell test".
The article does not indicate sample size or methodology. Nor does it indicate much about motivation of the study. There could well be something there, but there is ample reason to doubt it.