Spam Doesn't Work?

An anonymous reader writes "Businesses who believe the hype that spam works should read this article. It seems that the more recipients that you spam, the less likely they are to respond (startlingly obvious, but this seems to prove it)." Somehow I doubt this. If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning? Someone is buying.

Spam works!

My penis is 12" long, and I have never run out of laser toner. Surely this proves it!?

Re:Spam works!

My penis is 12" long, and I have never run out of laser toner. Surely this proves it!?

Yes, but it started out 13" long and you only have an inkjet, which never draws upon the laser cartrigdes.

You've been suckered, dude. Take your spammers and your shortened wanker to court.

Re:Spam works!

Can anyone translate this: AÁÙ¦bâúÃ20%H¥Î¥dÜ??

I think it may be an important message since they keep sending it to me everyday to multiple addresses. I think someone I know may be hurt or lost in China.

Re:Spam works!

Did you never read your spam? You attach the full toner cartridges to your penis with a string... it hurts, and the cartridges kinda make a noise when you walk around town, but after five years I can honestly say that it works. Also, you *never* run out of toner... it's always just there, within reach. Just send me $50 today and I'll send detailed instructions!
A word of advice... if anyone asks, tell them you're doing experimental art. If it's a pretty girl that asks, say you were selected from several hundred prospective artists because of the girth and strength of your equipment.
Spam saved my life - it can do the same for you. Don't hesitate - send me the money NOW!

Faulty conclusion

The study was about asking informational questions, not about hawking products to the masses. The "bystander effect" doesn't apply here.

Re:Faulty conclusion

Someone who read the article -- will wonders never cease?

You're correct. The "researchers" in question sent out an e-mail to students, staff, etc., at the Technion technology institute (where they work), asking if the institute had a biology faculty. This is rather different from someone sending out an e-mail to 10,000 random addresses, offering... well, you know what they offer... and hoping for a bite from a small percentage.

The methodology utilized, the fact they were seeking information rather than selling something a la normal spam, etc., etc. -- I just don't think there's any way you can legitimately extrapolate this to apply to spam in the accepted sense of the word.

Number of Recipients

Also, their conclusion was based on the fact that the recipients knew how many other people were included in the CC: field. The more people there were, the less likely they were to respond. All pretty intuitive, but hardly applicable to email that is addressed to hundreds of thousands of people.

Gee... I'd hate to see the CC: field for that test message...

OMG! A sucker *is* born every minute!!!!

"for every 10,000 pieces of spam mail sent at least 1 gets a 'buyer'

so the more spam sent the more buying happens.. simple logic"

Hypothesis: A sucker is born every minute.

OK, so scale that up to the population of the earth: Send out 6x10^9 spams. How many responses do you get?

6x10^9 / 10^4 = 600000

Thus by this scaling, there are 6x10^6 suckers on earth.

Now how many minutes are there in a year? 365 d/year* 24 h/day * 60 min/h = 525600 minutes/year

5.26 x 10^6 == (approx) 6 x 10^6

Thus the number of suckers on the planet Earth == (approx) the number of minutes in a year!

Conclusion: A sucker is born every minute! (give or take a few)

--- Q.E.D. !!!! --- (Thank you spam research!)

Obvious?

the more recipients that you spam, the less likely they are to respond (startlingly obvious

How is this obvious at all, or even correct? The people you spam have no knowledge of how many others get spammed by the same person/company. Although your odds of getting a bite have to be ridiculously low, they most certainly have to go up with every mailbox you hit. Basic statistics!

Mark

Re:Obvious?

Actually having 2 diffrent past employers experiment with it I can tell you first hand that is exactly correct.

The smaller lists are more likely to be a list of previous customers or otherwise targeted.

The larger lists on the other hand are likely to be spidered off websites and ripped from newspostings then minimally cleaned to find the easy to spot bad addresses.

The larger lists are also more likely to get people so pissed off about spam that they are likely to do something about it that involves a loss of resources on the spammer's side.

Re:Obvious?

Basic statistics!

14% of all statistics are made up on the spot. Besides, statistics don't mean anything. 32% of all people know that.

Maybe you should READ THE ARTICLE

What they say is that the more addresses on the Cc: header, the less likely each recipient is to respond. Nothing to do with how many people actually get the same message, only how many other addresses each recipient actually sees.

I have 4 Letters for you....

T.M.D.A.

It stands for tagged message delivery agent.

Read more here [tmda.net]

Number of spam recieved since I installed it 3 weeks ago: None!

Go ahead, [e-mail] spam the hell outta me. It wont get though! Sell my e-mail! Post it on any message board you want. I'm not gonna get any spam.

If any of you /.ers are running qmail and managing your own email server, i wholeheartedly reccommend you investigate tmda. I enjoy checking my mail again.

Re:I have 4 Letters for you....

My problem is that, while it will keep the spam out of my mailbox, the TMDA method still consumes resources on my server. Doubly so now, too because each incoming "unknown" mail will generate an outgoing message. If I can deny the message before the session even reaches the DATA phase (i.e. by using RBL's and checking the header), then I don't have to deal with the spam at all.

Headline is wrong.

Altough this is an interesting topic, the qrite up and headline have nothing to do with the article.

The article talks about people ignoring questions from people that send the question to a group.

Re:Headline is wrong.

Yeah, it doesn't say anything at all about anonymous e-mails to people soliciting goods and services. It's about writing a group of people you know asking for assistance with something, etc. Of course, I wonder if it would have the same effect if you simply used the BCC: line and wrote it so they thought they were the only person receiving. It isn't too difficult to send mail to a large group of people and make it appear that each person is the only receiving it. If they know other people got it, then yes, they're more than likely going to assume someone else will do it.

Re:Headline is wrong.

Of course, I wonder if it would have the same effect if you simply used the BCC: line and wrote it so they thought they were the only person receiving.

The study in the article did just that. Some of the people received an email that looked like it was just to them, others saw many names in the to: field. They found that people who thought they were singled out were more likely to be helpful.

The relevant psychological phenomena are called bystander apathy [chuckiii.com] and diffusion of responsibility [ndirect.co.uk]. In each, the more people in a group, the less likely each individual is to help/work.

This is nothing particularly new, it just says that people behave consistently in person or when contacted by email. It has nothing to do with commercial SPAM, only with requests for information/help to others.

Anyhow, the article does not apply to most spam

It refers to long 'cc' lists, and is intuitvely true. Any self-respecting spam is sent personally to me, and really professional spam has a forged 'from' header that is someone I know. (Maybe I can patent this concept. "Description of a Computerised Machine for the Convincement of Naive Buyers as to the Authenticity and Validity of Unrequested Commercial Messages".)

Do something about it Taco....

Somehow I doubt this. If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning? Someone is buying.

OK Taco... someone mentions this everytime you complain about spam, install Spamassassin [spamassassin.org] and be done with it. No joke, over 5 spams a day to a spam maildir, where it sits for 2 days just in case it's legit, then promptly to /dev/null ... it even makes getting spams fun.

Hell, if you need help, fork over one of them slashdot.org email addresses and I'll help you for free. :P

You're getting spam because you don't use Pyzor

http://pyzor.sourceforge.net/

HTH

Cost and Customers

A couple thoughts, actually.

• If spamming is basically cost-free for the spammer - why not?
  
• tech-savvy spammers don't sell penis enlargement equipment - they sell the concept of spam to penis-enlargement equipment manufacturers.
  

Uhh.. BCC?

This article doesn't say anything about "spam doesn't work". The article says that people will likely ignore things with lots of people in the CC: block.

The clear moral has nothing to do with not utilizing junk e-mail. The moral is, if you're sending something to a bunch of people, use your mail client's "bcc" (blind carbon copy) header, not to: or cc:. This is a good idea for a variety of other reasons as well.

Moreover, the example they tested this with was not a commercial mailing. It was an informational query. People didn't respond because they assumed someone else would get it. Not buying the product listed in a commercial spam because "someone else will" does not make any sense. (Not that I know anyone who has ever bought ANYTHING, or even visited a website, based on a spam they recieved, but i digress.) If you want something relevant to spam, try spamming a bunch of people with one link using CC, then spamming a bunch of people with another link using BCC, and see which link gets more hits. You'll probably find that there's a psychological tendency to more like things that feel "personal". (But i think if there's a truism in the internet world today, it's that NO ONE likes spam..)

Silly taco.

Are they really buying??

I think a main reason we still get 20+ spams a day is not that they're effective, but that they're very cheap. In conparsion to other forms of advertising, the cost of spam is trivial.

Any type of computer based advertising has a high annoyance factor. Most of us grew up with ad-less computers, so why should we submit to it now? In contrast, most TV has always been a advertising vehicle, so we don't mind as much when we get hit with TV ads.

Article not about commercial spam . . .

If you haven't read the article yet, it's not about commercial spam at all, but the psychological effects of getting an email asking a question from someone you know, with more names in the cc: field resulting in more of a "someone else will answer it" effect.

It really has nothing to do with commercial spam, and the original post here did nothing to make that distinction.

Obvious explanation...

No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. --- H. L. Mencken

s/taste/stupidity/ and I think it still works. Explains a lot, doesn't it? ;^)

I think Barnum also spoke to this subject...

fwd'ing based spamfiltering?

I'm in the process of building in a visual-tagging-only whitelist for my personal homebrew webmail sysytem, msgs from people I've ever mailed and/or with subjects I've written with are marked "likely not spam".

I wouldn't mind sending the rejects to a secondary filter, and then having it send the non-spam ones back to a special address I can pull together...so who offers a service like that?

someone's buying

"If Spam didn't work, why do I get a hundred pieces of it every morning? Someone is buying."

That's simple, alot of small business owners are stupid and they buy lists. that's who's buying

I'll tell you why Spam doesn't work.

First of all there is the annoyance factor. Today I recieved 7 messages from 7 different addresses and they all had the same thing. A picture of a naked woman...the same woman in all 7 messages. Since I never know who is going to be in my house at any given time this is not appropiate.

I do not own my own house and therefore I do not need a second mortgage, nor do I have the ability to sell my non-existant house.

As a guy I'm quite sure that I do not need to enhance my bust size nor does my girlfriend need her penis enlarged.

Spam does not work because there is no targeting involved. People who spam equate thier advertising tricks with TV ads...this is very wrong. Notice with TV ads that there is some thought as to who watches a show at any given time and the ads reflect this. You'll find Supermarket and Food ads near mealtimes, you see car ads when the 30-40 year old people watch, Toys during cartoon or cartoon specials. They target and they work. Spam does not.

Also with TV ads there is a way of getting the product. Car Dealerships give addresses and phone numbers. A Supermarket will tell show you a map. A Toy company will tell you to go to a toy store of your choice. Spam in way of contrast leaves you with no way of contacting the person who sent it as the mailer account changes each time it sends out a batch, and the webpages are often not a listed URL, but nothing more than an IP address...no consumer confidence from me at those pages.

The only thing that Spam sells consistantly is products to ease the symptoms of stress that comes from getting 50 of the [censored]ing things a day.

Re:I'll tell you why Spam doesn't work.

How you got modded up to 2 Is beyond me. The REASON that it isn't appropriate is because I do NOT need to have a naked woman on my screen when I'm trying to teach my grandmother how to conect to her e-mail NOR do I need that displayed when children are around.

If you think that such pictures are sutable for display whenever and wherever it pops up regardless of who's in the room, then I'm not the one with "pretty much warped values" now am I?

How To Stop Spam

Spam is what economicists call an external diseconomy. Simply speaking, it's a resource that general society pays for, not the business. Since the business views the resource as being low or no cost, it will use the resource as much as possible, disregarding the fact that it is costing internet users everywhere.

These are exactly the forces that cause industrial pollution. It costs businesses little or nothing to dump their waste products in local lakes; society as a whole pays for the degradation of the environment.

When you have an external diseconomy, the only way to restrain businesses from taking advantage is to change the cost structure - make businesses pay the true cost of spam through internet rate changes, or enact legislation to make it illegal (the later is the strategy used to control pollution).

It's not the recipients who are buying

You get spam because some guillible guy in marketing buys the ability to spam from an "Intenet Marketting Guru". The poor marketing guy is convinced that even a 0.1% is likely and will be profitable.

It's not us who gets suckered into buying the crappy product that doesn't work, it's them.

Spam and MLM?

After a stint of sleeplessness last week I was starting to wonder if some of the spam actually comes through multi level marketing scams. Some of the pitches on late night TV (make $3000 a month on your computer) sound a lot like whoever falls for them is stuck putting up web pages or sending email about Herbal Viagra etc.

There seem to be some somewhat legitimate businesses that seem to have fallen for list sellers, but 99,999% of the spam I get seems to deal with totally screwball products and services.

Does anyone have an idea if MLM has discovered spam or is it really just some groups or companies that send this stuff under hundreds of different names?

Article has nothing to do with Spam

The research revolves around the number of visible email addresses in the To: (and I would imagine the Cc: headers). When people see a message sent to a bunch of others, they are less likely to respond.

Only the crudest spam include more than your email address, most don't even have that. email addresses are like gold to spammers and they don't give them away by revealing them in a large To: or Cc: header.

This is another example of the downfall of Slashdot. This article should never have reached the front page.

Brian

Logical Failure: If They Do It, It Must Work

> If Spam didn't work, why do I get a
> hundred pieces of it every morning? > Someone is buying.

Wrong. The fact that people send huge volumes of spam does not mean anyone is buying. Indeed, most spam comes from people who have been duped by list-sellers and email-sending-service sellers, into believing the same logical mistake.

Dozens of dot-com companies spent tens of millions of dollars on TV and radio advertising. They wouldn't do that unless it worked, right? But if that's true, why did they all go bankrupt, and why did so some report that they spent more money on advertising than they received in gross sales?

For a clever spammer, it costs almost nothing to send spam, so the mere prospect of a single sale is enough to justify sending millions of spams. For a stupid spammer who believes what the remailer or list-seller says, spamming is a bad business decision, just as many folks who advertise in the newspaper or yellow pages would probably not do so if they tracked the results and compared the cost.

The culprits for spam are ignorance and greed, not actual profit.

It's called "carpet bombing"

The more bombs you drop, the more likely you are to hit something. Sure, they're unguided, but they are inexpensive and there are lots and lots and lots of them. This is especially true on the net. People are biting. They're the same people who scout the papers for coupons and better deals. Not every piece of spam is a penile enlargement ad. Granted, I dump spam as soon as I get it, but it'd be naive to think there aren't at least some good deals out there, and there are people actively searching for those deals. I have to agree CmdrTaco... Somebody is buying. It just isn't you.

I think Bernard Shifman discovered this lesson

And he discovered it the hard way. I don't think anyone here will ever forget how he blacklisted himself from every IT employer in the industry.

Rules of not getting spammed.

1. Don't put your email address on the web.
2. Don't pick a name that will be targeted by a dictionary or brute force spam attack:
e.g. "ggh@hotmail" will get spammed.
"lovetocook@hotmail" will get spammed.
"arh6yypolk11j@hotmail" will not get spammed. (well, it will now that it's on Slashdot)

As an experiment, I created a test email address at hotmail that was 20 random characters long. Every once in a while I would send it emails, or send emails from it to myself just to keep it alive.

Never once in several months did I receive any spam.

Re:Rules of not getting spammed.

"1. Don't put your email address on the web."

And if you absolutely must put the address on the web, make sure you encode it using something like Mailto Encrypter [spaceports.com] so that spambots will not catch it.

I have addresses posted on websites for months now which receive NO spam at all because they are encoded.

Re:Delete

I use a unique name for everything I need to hand an email address to.. ie.. [e-mail] would be the email address i give to microsoft.. that way.. not only will i kill the address if it starts getting spammed, I know who sold me up the river.