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12% of E-mail Users Have Responded To Spam
Meshach writes "An article in Ars Technica claims that 12% of internet users have actually responded to spam messages and tried to buy items. Although I find this hard to believe, it does explain why my spam folder is always full." Also in spam news, wjousts links to a Technology Review article about how spammers get your e-mail address, writing "E-mail addresses in comments posted to a website had a high probability of getting spammed, while of the 70 e-mail addresses submitted during registration at various websites, only 4 got spammed."
I'm posting as an anonymous coward, so they don't spam my e-mail address.
How else are they going to win the Nigerian lottery? You can't win if you don't enter.
Thought thinks itself.
12%?
Really? I honestly thought it would be much higher...just basing that off of some of my daily interactions with people. It's a good thing breathing is an involuntary action, cause there are a lot of people out there who'd forget to.
Sent from your iPad.
The entire premise of this article depends on the definition of "spam." One could mark a legitimate business' unsolicited email as spam, but that doesn't mean that purchasing a product because of the material in one of those emails is newsworthy.
Nigerian princes in peril are another matter, though.
Terrify people into compliance!
"Hey, y'know gramma - I heard answering junk email funds the terrorists." ...
"Yep, that's right - that email you've got right there advertising cheap knob-expanders? That came straight from Osama bin Laden's laptop, uh huh."
I would have liked the article to state which sites sell e-mail addresses to spammers. They would certainly deserve it.
I use unique e-mail addresses for (almost) everything I sign up for, and I've never gotten a spam message from any of those unique accounts. I started getting a lot of spam when I first posted to LKML, which is published online.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
The data may be skewed: users may consider offers from genuine mailing lists 'spam' whether they've signed up to it intentionally or not, when completing a survey. This more relevant stuff is more likely click-worthy. The survey doesn't necessarily make this distinction and account for it.
Otherwise, it is somewhat believable as many individuals new to the internet learn many lessons the hard way.
Mind you, "but another 13 percent said they simply had no idea why they did it; they just did." explains why I still receive 'send this to 10 people or you will has bad luck' from otherwise intelligent and educated people.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Hey! I got a great deal on penis enlargement, breast enhancement, and this greasy stuff you rub all over your body to increase your sexual desirability scent! Works great! Now if I could only get the dog to stop sniffing me, all the women would be barking at my door!
Sad to say, one of the places that I buy "generic viagra" from would not return my money when it did not work as well as the "super size me" products... I will just have to wait for my money from the deal I made in Nigeria to counter that loss.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
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That was my thought too. People responding to 12% of all spam is quite a bit different than 12% of people having every responded to a spam email. A 12% response rate for an email marketing campaign is enough to make any marketers nipples hard enough to cut glass.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
and that was it. No link, no pictures. My theory is I have a really good friend who goes through a whole lot of effort just to make me smile. Either that, or it's an insult on my manhood designed to make me feel inadequate.
I got this username and email as an experiment. I have only posted it publicly on Slashdot and have not used it for anything else. I don't even check it. I just checked. I have 5,000 messages in my spam folder. And gmail deletes them after a month. So posting my email publicly on Slashdot only is resulting in 5,000 spams a month.
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A friend of mine invited me to linkedin by using my personal email address and lo and behold I started getting a ton of spam relating to owning a business.
Never EVER EVER type your (or a friends') email address in to a website no matter how reputable they seem.
They will change their privacy policy the second they decide to make a buck.
And I hope the linkedin people go to hell because now that email address is about useless.
Rats would be more funny if they could fart.
One interesting thing I noticed, is that they didnt talk at all about is normal chain-emails. How many times do you receive an email from a friend with some sort of cute story that has been forwarded 10 times before it reaches you. You have to scroll down past 5 pages of email headers, which conveniently contain every email address of people who have been copied on that email. Eventually, one of those chain emails reaches a spammer, and they now have a couple hundred *validated* email addresses to spam to.
Thats why when I (on rare occasion) forward an email, I delete all the previous email headers, and BCC everyone on the list so that the people I send the email to don't get their email address added. Of course, my email address is still shown as the source, so if the people I send to don't follow the same behavior as me, then my address gets added to the forward list.
WTB [sig], PST!!!
Is the one developed by the hard working folks at the OpenBSD project whom have been studying spam for well over 5 years. They came up with something that is devlishly clever called OpenBSD Spamd. Spamd is basically a fake smtp engine that sets the TCP RWIN to 1. By doing this, it causes the transmission speed to slow to 1 byte per second. This can cause a backlog or even crash the spam spender. Fight back, don't filter! You can even create a serious of spam trap addresses, publish them, and reverse harvest the IP addresses of the spam senders. Check out http://www.openbsd.org/