When Spam Email Becomes Too Prolific, It's Self Defeating

[engine]

The swarm of customer support and payment request, etc., spam e-mails (with a payload) that are doing the rounds have reached epidemic proportions.

This huge volume has become so common that i'd be surprised if people are fooled by them. Even friends that are Net and computer unenlightened have commented to me about the swarms.

I guess this applies to many aspects of promotion and marketing: Is its sheer volume self defeating?

[piatkow]

So many that I am starting to worry that I might zap something important by mistake.

[sem4u]

Too much volume and I just start deleting...of course something I need may end up in the recycle bin.

[Old_Honky]

I have always deleted all of them. I have more Viagra laced with rat poison that I will ever need, and if you've laundered your fifty million dollars for a dodgy Nigerian and got a cool 10,000,000 in the bank it is just being plain greedy to go again.

[sem4u]

I just knew there was an easier way of making money than this SEO lark! ;)

[tonynoriega]

My Viagra supply tastes like ShockTarts.... delicious.

Hey.... wait a minute?!

[swa66]

Spam will kill email long before enough users out there start to outright boycotting anything and everything being spammed for.

The only way to beat spam: make sure they sell LESS than if they had not spammed (with the nearly negligible cost of spam, we need to seek the cost of spam in their normal business).

But I'm slowly accepting email will go where usenet went and loose its use pretty soon despite all efforts not to let that happen.

[anand84]

My mom called me over the other day to confirm if a mail she had received was actually spam so that she could delete it. I felt so happy...

[anand84]

I guess this applies to many aspects of promotion and marketing: Is its sheer volume self defeating?

Depends on what kind of promotion it is..If it is merely for the brand-recall, then more promotion equals more recognition..

Even here, we all have seemed to have agreed on the Viagra stuff.If it were a genuine promotion, it would been so popular..

[kaled]

I've said it before but...

Email is fundamentally flawed - it's 100% push instead of 10% push and 90% pull. That is to say, only headers need to be pushed together with an address where the email can be downloaded. This would make address spoofing impossible and spam detection trivial.

Even if you take the view that spammers will find some way around this, it would still reduce the bandwidth used significantly since most spam would never be downloaded.

If anyone wishes to discuss this point, please start a new thread and quote me.

Kaled.