Spam...

[Buffy]

Mass scam-spam, I don't know. I do know we just did a targetted mailing to only 400 e-mails and got a 5% response rate. Average for direct mail these days is 1-3%. I have another customer with a list of about 2000 solely gathered from visitors to their site, and they get a bump of a dozen sales every newsletter that goes out monthly.

So, bottom line, yeah, it works....Barnum was right....

Ink cartridges!
Buffy

[Jay-qu]

Originally Posted by InfiniteNow

This is with gmail's well designed system as well.

Two accounts. One for friends, one for other. It's your best option.

perhaps you do not know gmails 'system' as well as you think young padawan!

Originally Posted by Lordshaper.com

Gmail has an interesting quirk where you can add a plus sign (+) after your Gmail address, and it'll still get to your inbox. It's called plus-addressing, and it essentially gives you an unlimited number of e-mail addresses to play with. Here's how it works: say your address is pinkyrocks@gmail.com, and you want to automatically label all work e-mails. Add a plus sign and a phrase to make it pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com and set up a filter to label it work (to access your filters go to Settings->Filters and create a filter for messages addressed to pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com. Then add the label work).

More real world examples:

Find out who is spamming you: Be sure to use plus-addressing for every form you fill out online and give each site a different plus address.

Example: You could use
pinkyrocks+nytimes@gmail.com for nytimes.com
pinkyrocks+freestuff@gmail.com for freestuff.com
Then you can tell which site has given your e-mail address to spammers, and automatically send them to the trash.

Automatically label your incoming mail: I've talked about that above.

Archive your mail: If you receive periodic updates about your bank account balance or are subscribed to a lot of mailing lists that you don't check often, then you can send that sort of mail to the archives and bypass your Inbox.

Example: For the mailing list, you could give pinkyrocks+mailinglist1@gmail.com as your address, and assign a filter that will archive mail to that address automatically. Then you can just check in once in a while on the archive if you want to catch up.

[Michaelangelica]

I have found gmail a very effective spam filter

But then, while you have Hypography (not accepted by spell check!) moderators promoting breast enlargement schemes what can you expect?
Post 30-31 'Fragrance and perfume' thread

[InfiniteNow]

So, if we assume a 1% response rate, let's come up with some hypotheticals on this "fishing with a net" concept.

Small ad firm of 10 employees. Each employee sends 2,000 spam messages a day (with access to lists, this number is incredibly conservative, and could be in the hundreds of thousands). So that means this one small ad firm sends 20,000 spam messages a day. Let's assume a 7-day week, since our keyboard stroking friends can do this from home... resulting in approximately 140,000 spam messages sent by this one small ad firm. Let's assume 46 weeks in the year to allow for holiday and illness, so this small ad firm sends annually six and a half million spam messages.

1% of 6.5 million (taking the conservative estimate discussed above) will result in a response rate of 65,000. Ewww... no wonder there are so many of them.

Even if my estimates are off by three factors of 10, there are enough people clicking and visiting to cover the expense and put cash in pockets.

However, the response rate itself is subject to the law of diminishing returns, which itself will be accelerated due to 1) increased effectiveness of filter technology, and 2) people's increased frustration with advertising boogers.


BTW MA, lavender just smells nice.

[Michaelangelica]

Originally Posted by InfiniteNow

So, if we assume a 1% response rate, let's come up with some hypotheticals on this "fishing with a net" concept.


BTW MA, lavender just smells nice.

Yes but US spammers spam to Australia all the time for services that cannot be purchased from here. (Is that just a example of lousy US geography knowledge or Arrogant World Hegemony?) It is very annoying. Dozens of stockbroker tips, Viagra etc. Who would buy from such annoying twits?
Have you ever tried to reply to a spammer? (To tell them to go away)
Most often you can't, so what is the point!
Perhaps they believe the 1% response thing, which is probably mailing-list owner's advertising hype.

BTW IN
I don't like the smell of lavender, then again, maybe it depends where it is being put and who is doing the putting.

[Jay-qu]

Id say the most common type of spammer is a computer.. sif you would pay people to spam email when you can feed a list of emails to a computer hit enter and walk off, I bet i could go find a program to do this.

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by Michaelangelica

Yes but US spammers spam to Australia all the time for services that cannot be purchased from here. (Is that just a example of lousy US geography knowledge or Arrogant World Hegemony?)

Actually, probably about 20% of my upstream filtered spam these days is in Russian! Do they think the rest of us know how to read it?

Have you ever tried to reply to a spammer?

Don't. At least some still use replies to build "premium" spam lists that they can charge more money for because they can guarantee the stuff is getting through. This used to be generally true, but the vast majority of spam today uses the same "To" lists to generate "From" addresses, which is why you should never *bounce* e-mail or put up "I'm out of the office" replies, because it can result in your address being added to spam filters as a spam source!

Originally Posted by InfiniteNow

1% of 6.5 million (taking the conservative estimate discussed above) will result in a response rate of 65,000. Ewww... no wonder there are so many of them.

1% response rate is probably at least a couple of orders of magnitude too high for mass-spam, but as you say Now, that still pays the bills....

Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and ,
Buffy