The joys of the Internet. I have pretty strong spam-blocking on my mail server now, courtesy of tens of thousands of attempted mail deliveries every day to the scant dozen inboxes on my server. However, a few sneak through my filters, blacklist, greylists, and spam-traps. This is one such. The tale of one persistent offshore marketer operating under a fake name. I wonder if she’ll write back?
On Tue, May 15, 2007 13:08, Andrea Vernon wrote: Hi Matthew, This is with reference to an email, which was sent to you on May 11, 2007 (attached below). I would like to hear from you with regards to Email Marketing and Lead Generations. Please let me know your thoughts.
Thanks Andrea Vernon
—– Original Message —– From: Andrea Vernon To: matthew at barnson.org Sent: Friday, May 11, 2007 8:40 AM Subject: New Business Oppurtunities for the Quarter
Hi Matthew ,
I did some research on your website and identified couple of marketing possibilities to enhance the lead pipeline for you. Please find attached Prepacked Business Email lists released by Sixchannels on May 03nd 2007. If you are interested in more information or would like to see a few samples records, please send me an email or it would be great if you could suggest me a good time for a quick call.
If you feel I should talk to somebody else in your organization, it would be great if you can forward this email to the right person.
Thank you and I look forward to hearing from you.
Andrea Vernon SixChannels 713-893-4176 www.SixChannels.com AndreaV@SixChannels.com
Alternate Contact: Jeff Anderson
My response is this. I don’t like unsolicited commercial email (spam). I have no interest in talking with you about my web site due to your unethical, poorly-researched marketing method (spamming) and your use of off-shore bulletproof hosting in an attempt to conceal your abuse.
Not only are you a spammer, but you are also advertising mailing lists to sell to other spammers, which makes you one of the worst sorts of low-life on the Internet, one step below Internet Trolls and one step above child pornographers.
Please don’t go away angry. Just go away.
Regards, Matthew P. Barnson
I traced her IP address and history surrounding her murky little marketing company “Six Channels”. Yeah. “Andrea Vernon” and “Jeff Anderson” work out of an office in Mumbai, India, for a company headquartered in Ireland with strong affiliations to known spam gangs? Sounds like a legitimate business opportunity.
Now pull the other one. I really, really despise spammers. Not enough to want to kill them, but enough to want to banish them all somewhere where their only connection to humanity is other scammers on some remote island without any Internet connectivity.
Spam represents 88% of total e-mail volume
“Spam represented 88.17% of the total e-mail volume received by large enterprises for November 2007, according to a new report by e-mail security services firm Proofpoint Inc.”
People understanding…
And some people have trouble understanding why I, as a professional UNIX system administrator, I hate spam so much.
1. Spam costs my company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in bandwidth. 2. It costs my company millions of dollars a year in personnel to keep spam to sane levels so that the rest of the employees can get their jobs done. 3. Spammers actively work to get around filters. This is like putting a lock on your gate to keep people from putting leaflets on your door, so they start shelling you with leaflet-mortars. Shouldn’t the lock be enough to let you know “hey, no soliciting here, we won’t listen to your message!”? 4. Spammers exploit malware, viruses, and trojans to deliver their message, hijacking tens of millions of computers around the world. They are running illicit printing presses in the homes of people who did not agree for them to do so. 5. They are often selling drugs through illegal vehicles (Mexican pharmacies to the USA, for instance). 6. They lie about how they got your name. This has decreased in recent years as filters have improved, because phrases like “you elected to receive this mailing through an opt-in process” are a red-flag for spam filters.
Spammers are persistent, petty thieves. As much as I want stronger deterrents at a visceral level, I know that the only real fix is to change the SMTP protocol in a profound, basic way in order to provide trust metrics for mail delivery.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Like telemarketing
What blows my mind is that spam has to somehow be profitable. Like telemarketing, if it didn’t work, the nuisance would have disappeared by now.
As I understand it, the goal of spam is no longer solely to achieve a direct sale. Even with the number of less-than-computer-savvy users out there, the number of people who have finally wised up to spam has increased to such a point that I can’t imagine the return on investment in spam tactics would be sufficient if they were just trying to get click-throughs and orders.
But there’s also the old rule in marketing of “8”. Or namely, if someone sees your product and your slogan 8 times, it becomes stuck in their head. Spam now helps products achieve name recognition through constant hammering on the walls of your subconscious.
Case in point, one of the popular spam markets now is erectile dysfunction. 5 years ago, had I been in the need for any medication regarding said issue (not that I did then or ever will… harumph…), I would have gone with Viagra because of all the TV ads. But since then, the word “Cialis” has been hammered into my skull by endless emails, to the point that if I weren’t careful (ie reminding myself consciously where it was that I’d heard “Cialis” so much), my subconscious would sway me into going with that medication.
Are there any other overall strategies spammers use that any of you all know of? Know thine enemy, and all that…
Still dollar signs
I’m skeptical about spam as a pure marketing vehicle with no direct returns. Although many say “no publicity is bad publicity”, think about some things with remarkably bad publicity that died on the vine (later, sometimes, to come back):
* Pop Rocks * Silicone Breast Implants * Enron stock
That may be a non-sequitur, but I tend to think that if publicity is bad enough (like “this product is unsafe”, “this company used unscrupulous accounting practices”, or “may kill you”) people will tend to steer clear.
I seem to remember a former spammer once giving up some numbers. Let’s take a hypothetical mortgage spammer, off-the-cuff, back-of-the-envelope, etc.: * 60 million emails sent. Cost: $80/month for an off-shore bulletproof hosting account, zero cost beyond that. * One in 100,000 response rate (600 people). * One in a million refinance rate @ $200,000 (60 people refinance). * Unethical mortgage broker who hired the spammer gets $2000 up front at closing, plus another $2000 on the back end. That’s a pretty typical payment schedule from a lender for a broker. * Broker agreed to give 10% of the sale to the spammer. * Spammer made $400 for one sale… multiply that times sixty.
He just made $24,000 for one job, with a one-in-a-million completion rate.
Maybe I’m working in the wrong industry… with my technology prowess and thick skin, I could be a fantastic spammer and make a lot more money!
And hooray to Sammy G. for being a thread necromancer and bringing this thread back to life seven months later…
—
Matthew P. Barnson