Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: annoyed
  • Music: Monster High, "Fright Song."

Seriously, does spam ever work? Like, EVER?

So far this morning, I have deleted seven spam comments, and blocked the commenters from posting in my journal again. I have also deleted five spam emails submitted through my website contact form (which proves, I think, that we're training spambots to pass Turing Tests, since you have to prove humanity before my website lets you email me).

I read a web comic called Skin Horse, and pretty much daily, the comment section is kudzu'd by spammers, until one of the admins comes along and deletes the offers of cheap drugs, hand bags, imported wives, and free money from a bank in a country that doesn't exist. So far as I know, none of the readers of Skin Horse really want any of these things.

My message boards are in a continual state of "behind" when it comes to approving users, because we have to work so hard to not approve spammers.

And through it all...I don't know anyone who has ever purchased something from a spammer. Most people are so anti-spam that they reject perfectly legitimate purchases, because they've decided that they're "spammy." (This did not happen to me, thankfully, but a friend of mine was told, on their own journal, "I will never buy your books, because you're SO SPAMMY about them." Said friend pretty much confined talk of books to that journal. The journal is gone now. Because that's how much we fear being slammed for spam.) All spam seems to do is waste our time and make us paranoid about clicking things. It's like the TSA of shit you encounter on the Internet.

I do not want .jpgs and spam. I do not want them, Sam I Am.
Tags: cranky blonde is cranky, don't be dumb, technology
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  • 70 comments
...go 1 level up... Expand

palmer_kun

March 4 2011, 03:08:03 UTC 6 years ago

The problem is that each spam email is sent to you, everyone you know, and a THOUSAND TIMES AS MANY people.

It costs pennies to send 100 million spam emails.
If even one person clicks through and buys something that earns you $2 in profit... you're making money.

If only one in a million people ever buy... that's still 100 people.
The link above with the experiment? Sent 935 million emails. 222 million didn't bounce. Of those, they had a clickthrough rate of 0.0127 - that's about 1 in 8000. Over 28000 people clicked the link.
0.266% actually clicked "Buy", that's about 75 people.

75 people out of 200 million. It's barely enough to notice... but the cost of sending 900 million emails makes those 75 idiots worth it.
Of those people,

the_s_guy

March 4 2011, 19:51:33 UTC 6 years ago

And it's beyond the point where charging for anything over 1000 emails per day, or have filters drift upstream, would work, because they're not all coming from the one source - zombie botnets are sending them.

Sites mentioned in spam mail can't be automatically DDOSed or suspended because of joe-jobs.

Sites mentioned in spam mail can't be cut off after being definitely identified as spam, because they will have moved on before the review process kicks in.

ISPs could do more to identify infected machines amongst their users, but that doesn't mean all ISPs in all states and all countries will do the same.