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.
and my mortgage has never been longer or harder.
Beat 'Em and Eat 'Em
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."
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.
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'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"
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...
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.