Kill your spam
Monday April 19, 2004 – 10:11 amMy pal Susan turned me on to Death2Spam, a cool new spam-filtering service. Basic pest-control services are free, or you can get a premium account for $35/year. There’s nothing to install and the filtering kicks!!! It uses a real-time collaborative spam blacklist, so you’re helping your neighbor by using it. Best part: you can set it to pass along just the headers for anything it recognizes as spam. The message itself gets replaced with one sentence: Death to Spam! I love it. :-)
April 19th, 2004 at 11:01 pm
Thought for the Day…
If SPAM never works would mass mail marketing still be a viable medium for product marketing?
These days it’s virtually impossible to open your email and not find some sort of unsolicited advertisement.
How does this happen? Mass Mail Marketing, that’s how. Any time you fill out a form or a survey and include your email address, you are submitting your address to a marketing group. They then in turn add your address to the ever growing email list. In some cases your email address is added to an even bigger list and sold to other marketing companies.
Why? Because they can, and in this day and age it’s profitable. Information is the currency of the internet, and your personal information can be very valuable to some groups.
The marketing people then create a profile for you, what do you like? do you buy online? what sort of stuff do you buy? The lists are broken up by interests and buying habits and sold to marketing companies for products they think you might be interested in.
What happens then? SPAM happens. They send you emails attempting to sell you all sorts of things or get you to participate in one of their "programs".
The bottom line, it was a good idea, and there are millions of people that can be reached almost effortlessly, but somehow it has gotten out of control. Most of the stuff that flows into my mailbox is stuff that I am not interested in, nor would I trust it even if I was interested. I know I’m not the only person who feels this way, but what do you do?
Let’s look at this objectively… it does require some effort to generate the list of addresses and to distribute it to the correct marketing people, as well it requires effort to actually send the emails out. What if the effort never paid off? What if the mass mail marketing craze was completely unsuccessful, would they continue to put any effort into it? I would say no.
What does that mean? Basically: they keep spamming because it has a percentage of return. If it had 0% return they would have to give up and go back to the drawing board.
What can I do? don’t open SPAM. Never click the provided link in an unsolicited email, and never buy anything as a result of SPAM.
If you are infested in the product, manually browse to their website and check it out. Clicking their provided link returns information to the vendor saying what source brought you to their site, thus proving that SPAM works. We want to disprove that idea, SPAM doesn’t work, and it never will. Spread the word (in the form of spam if you like).
RJW
April 19th, 2004 at 11:23 pm
Uh… you talkin’ to me? Did you actually come to my site and sit there composing all that, or was it cut’n'pasted from earlier writings? Dude, I think it’s time you got your own website, you have plenty of material to run with there.