More on Spam

Regardless of your feelings on, or definitions of, SPAM. My question is a
bit more simple:

does it work? does sending out unsolicited bulk email increase business? Do
spammers actually make money.

About two or three times a year a news service like Wired will post an
article about how Spam works... but it feels to me that every one of those
articles is based on the same original article, and that one was specious.

So, does anyone on this list have hard facts of Spam working?

Thanks,

--
Patrick
www.covot.com
small business tools

"covot" <no@reply.com> wrote in message
news:ci8c3601b1a@enews3.newsguy.com...
>
> Regardless of your feelings on, or definitions of, SPAM. My question is a
> bit more simple:
>
> does it work? does sending out unsolicited bulk email increase business?
Do
> spammers actually make money.

Do thieves make money? They steal from other spammers and make money by
scamming people by getting paid to send spam.

>
> So, does anyone on this list have hard facts of Spam working?

That would be impossible to prove beyond the anecdotal.


--
McWebber
"Richter points to the lack of legal action against his company as proof
that he's operating appropriately."
Information Week, November 10, 2003

I would like to tie myself over to the discussion with "covot"
<no@reply.com> on 15 Sep 2004 03:14:46 GMT:
>Regardless of your feelings on, or definitions of, SPAM. My question is a
>bit more simple:
>
>does it work? does sending out unsolicited bulk email increase business? Do
>spammers actually make money.
>
>About two or three times a year a news service like Wired will post an
>article about how Spam works... but it feels to me that every one of those
>articles is based on the same original article, and that one was specious.
>
>So, does anyone on this list have hard facts of Spam working?

I too once asked the same question. I found the following URL:
http://www.claws-and-paws.com/spam/burn.shtml

Which after a little math gives the following figures:

0.004% positive response
0.16% complaints
$20 paid for each $15 earned
(and this is an old article, when spam was more welcome)

So, in answer to your question, no, it doesn't work - except maybe for
50-200 professional spammers, which make a living on spam and our misery.

Domchi

--
Antispam: to reply, remove extra monkey from reply-to address.

"covot" <no@reply.com> wrote:
> Regardless of your feelings on, or definitions of, SPAM.
> My question is a bit more simple:
>
> does it work? does sending out unsolicited bulk email
> increase business? Do spammers actually make money.

Sure, I've had clients that have successfully used unsolicited email
correspondence. However, it is like any other advertising medium. It all
depends on what you're selling and how you're pitching it. You're not going
to sell an expensive yacht by way of email. And with better and better spam
filters, hitting your targets is becoming ever increasingly difficult.

Scott Jensen
--
Peer-to-peer networking (a.k.a. file-sharing) is entertainment's future.
If you'd like to know why, read the white paper at the link below.
http://www.scottjensenshow.com/P2PRevolution.pdf

The best way to make money on SPAM is to sell a list of e-mail addresses to
unknowing business people so they can spam those people. Even offer to send
out the e-mails for them.

They will not get enough of a response and the complaints will knock their
site off the web.

But you will have made the $300-$900 to send out the 3 million e-mails.

Good luck


> Regardless of your feelings on, or definitions of, SPAM. My question is a
> bit more simple:
>
> does it work? does sending out unsolicited bulk email increase business?
Do
> spammers actually make money.
>

"covot" <no@reply.com> wrote in message
news:ci8c3601b1a@enews3.newsguy.com...
>
> Regardless of your feelings on, or definitions of, SPAM. My question is a
> bit more simple:
>
> does it work? does sending out unsolicited bulk email increase business?
> Do
> spammers actually make money.

Years ago, before the Internet took off and became popular, I used a service
from a company by the name of CompuServe that had email, file
upload/download areas, community groups kind of like newsgroups, etc. Back
then, spam was already called spam, and people really looked down upon it,
just as they do now. But, I was young and stupid, and thought I'd experiment
with it. I sent out, oh, maybe ten or twenty emails, and the results were
terrible. I got several nasty letters from the people I spammed. I got a
stern warning from CompuServe, and of course, nobody responded positively.
So, that was my experiment, and I never did it again.

But now, wow. There is so much spam out there. It is a pain in the neck, and
it is part of the cost of doing business.

Lets talk about something that, I think, is worse than spam: spyware. I have
been out in the field lately, and it seems that almost everyone's wintel
computer is infected with this crap. I have seen some incredibly sneaky and
effective spyware, and I'm pretty sure that this stuff brings in a lot of
money.

The nature of spyware is that it watches what you type and where you go on
the Internet, processes that data and then either reports that data to a
marketing research firm, or simply pops ads up onto your computer. Also, the
makers of spyware sneak that stuff onto your computer -- you never know that
its been installed, and when you do find out, its too late and its very
difficult to get rid of.

I saw a spyware program that created a set of tabs up at the top of the
Internet Explorer window. The tabs had labels like Entertainment, Shopping,
Sports, and so on. My customer wanted that and all the rest of that kind of
stuff removed from his computer. I popped over to google and typed in
"spyware". All of the sudden, the labels on the tabs changed to say Spyware,
Anti-virus, Firewalls, Computer Security, etc.

So, I clicked those tabs to see what was going on, and the pages were full
of links that clicked over to this spyware company's associate links.

Whoa. That's pretty damn tricky. If this particular spyware is even
reasonably distributed, whoever is putting it out there is going to be
brining is some bucks.

So, then, you ask, _aside_ from the matter of ethics, does spam make money?
I can't answer that question directly. However, if a person is willing to
set aside their ethics, there are many, many ways to make money, legally,
over the Internet, and spyware is a big one. Or, so it seems to me.

Of course, this is all highly anecdotal. So, this raises a few questions:

- How much money do people with good spyware?
- Is spyware worse than spam from an ethical perspective?
- What other unethical yet legal ways are there to make money on the
Internet?

Just curious!

Mike

P.S.

> www.covot.com
> small business tools

Patrick, you web site says "coming soon". What do you plan to provide in
terms of products and service?






>
>

"Mike Turco" <miketurco@yahoo-nospam4me.com> wrote in message
news:cid8880etg@enews1.newsguy.com...
>
>
> "covot" <no@reply.com> wrote in message
> news:ci8c3601b1a@enews3.newsguy.com...
> >
> > Regardless of your feelings on, or definitions of, SPAM. My question is
a
> > bit more simple:
> >
> > does it work? does sending out unsolicited bulk email increase business?
> > Do
> > spammers actually make money.
>
> The nature of spyware is that it watches what you type and where you go on
> the Internet, processes that data and then either reports that data to a
> marketing research firm, or simply pops ads up onto your computer. Also,
the
> makers of spyware sneak that stuff onto your computer -- you never know
that
> its been installed, and when you do find out, its too late and its very
> difficult to get rid of.
>
>
> Of course, this is all highly anecdotal. So, this raises a few questions:
>
> - How much money do people with good spyware?
> - Is spyware worse than spam from an ethical perspective?

It's specifically illegal in at least one state, (Utah), and probably
violates Federal computer crime statutes when installed without permission
as was happening with unpatched Internet Explorer users. (Change your
security settings to warn before running ActiveX).

> - What other unethical yet legal ways are there to make money on the
> Internet?
>

So far, spam and spyware are neither ethical or legal. Let's stick to
discussing ethical and legal ways to make money on the Internet.

If you do have Spyware on your computer, I'd recommend using these programs,
in order:
http://www.xblock.com/download-freeware.shtml XCleaner
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/ Adaware
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download3155.html HijackThis
HijackThis is a bit tricky to use. See
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=38752 for info. It has saved a
lot of computers.

Unfortunately, I recently saw some spyware that prevents any .exe or .zip
file from being downloaded so you may have to get someone to burn it on CD
for you.
Good luck.
--
McWebber
No email replies read
If someone tells you to forward an email to all your friends
please forget that I'm your friend.

is Adwear a form of spywear?
my friend is under the impression that adwear is good.


"Mike Turco" <miketurco@yahoo-nospam4me.com> wrote in message
news:cid8880etg@enews1.newsguy.com...
[ Some quoted text elided by moderator for brevity. -JimL ]
> Lets talk about something that, I think, is worse than spam: spyware. I
have
> been out in the field lately, and it seems that almost everyone's wintel
> computer is infected with this crap. I have seen some incredibly sneaky
and
> effective spyware, and I'm pretty sure that this stuff brings in a lot of
> money.
>
> The nature of spyware is that it watches what you type and where you go on
> the Internet, processes that data and then either reports that data to a
> marketing research firm, or simply pops ads up onto your computer. Also,
the
> makers of spyware sneak that stuff onto your computer -- you never know
that
> its been installed, and when you do find out, its too late and its very
> difficult to get rid of.
[ Remainder of quoted text elided by moderator. -JimL ]

"Jim Logajan" <JamesL@lugoj.com> wrote:
> "Scott T. Jensen" <stj@charter.net> wrote:
> > However, it is like any other advertising medium.
>
> As has been pointed out, it is the receivers who bear the
> brunt of the costs - that makes it unlike all other advertising
> mediums. I can think of no other medium where the cost of
> increasing the audience or the number of advertisers is
> forced unwanted upon that audience.

Try junk mail. You pay both with your time (which is more involved than
with spam on a per item basis) and you pay someone else to haul it away.
Using the same convoluted logic that anti-spammers use against spam, since
junk mail is part of your garbage (my junk mail commonly makes up fifty
percent of my garbage) and its volume drives up the cost of garbage
collection, you are paying to receive junk mail. In fact, junk mail is
worse than spam since spam doesn't hurt the environment as junk mail does.
Junk requires the cutting down of trees, supposedly contributes to the
greenhouse effect by all the transportation and processing of it, and, after
you throw it out, more transportation and then landfill space. Same goes
for those free and paid magazines and newspapers you get that include ad
pages and which you later throw away.

> Automated spam filters consume memory and processing
> resources -...

And junk mail costs businesses processing time too PLUS increases their
garbage collection fees. In fact, a daily time-consuming task for
receptionists and secretaries is simply weeding out the tons of junk mail
businesses regularly get. Another important processing job that
receptionists and secretaries do is handling unwanted cold calls from sales
people. And that's assuming that an employee has a receptionist or
secretary to handle these cold calls. If they don't, the employee ends up
having to handle them. On a per item basis, cold calls cost businesses the
most in employee time when compared to both spam or junk mail. Not to
mention it is the most disruptive of employee productivity of all forms of
advertising.

> IMHO, engaging in or promoting UCE is morally equivalent
> to engaging in or promoting the spray painting of slogans on
> the "public" road in front of people's homes in a city where
> such activity has not yet been deemed illegal. If one does
> not understand the ethical ramifications or the source
> of the ensuing community outrage, then I'm afraid no good
> end can be forseen for this discussion.

And while you're complaining about spammers, don't forget to whine about the
junk mailers, cold call sales people, billboard companies (who are simply
evil for blotting out the natural beauty of our countryside and actually had
a First Lady [Lady Bird Johnson] campaign against them), and all other
advertisers ... that make the free market system work. Everything you have
and own has been made possible and better with "evil" unwanted-by-most
advertising.

Advertising is a necessary part of business and there is no way to do it
without pissing someone off. Even if you try to limit how many you piss off
you will still piss most off. But not to do advertising is suicidal for any
business. Even governments ... organizations that have a monopoly with no
competitors ... advertise and know its value. Unsolicited commercial email
is really no better or worse than any other form of advertisers overall.
Businesses should do it if it produces them profits and it has for certain
types of products and services. Not all, but that can be said of any form
of advertising. And advertising benefits society FAR more than what it
costs it. Sorry, but nothing's free but the air you breath ... until
someone bottles it and sells it to us like water. Our free markets today
wouldn't exist without advertising and spam is just another form of
advertising.

Scott Jensen
--
Peer-to-peer networking (a.k.a. file-sharing) is entertainment's future.
If you'd like to know why, read the white paper at the link below.
http://www.scottjensenshow.com/P2PRevolution.pdf

Hi Harriet,

"Harriet" was sayin'
>
> is Adwear a form of spywear?

Yes.

> my friend is under the impression that adwear is good.

That's an odd thing to say. Can you ask your friend to clarify?

Thanks,

Mike