Another random question…
We all know that spammers are fraudulent scammers, preying on the clueless and easily-misled.
Are there any businesspeople who actually have a real product to offer at a real price, who advertise via spam? Are there spammers who try to convince businesspeople that spamming is a legitimate advertising technique?
Yup. Every so often, you’ll see an advertisement in a reputable source for a “direct marketing company”, who promises to get out word about your product to X many people. There’s often such an ad in the airline magazines, for instance. They never use the S word, of course, but it’s obvious enough to anyone even remotely tech-savvy what they’re doing.
In my experience, most of the legitimate companies with whom have ever done business on line, take that as permission to spam me with advertisements and promotions for their products ever after (no matter how many boxes I am careful to check or uncheck).
That is not spam. That’s just annoying marketing. If you look at the bottom of such emails you’ll probably find an unsubscribe link. Those links are pretty well honored (think there’s a legal requirement for them in some anti-spam regulation that was passed a while ago). Also, the email headers are legitimate and will lead to the original sender.
Spam is email that is broadcast to addresses obtained without the recipients consent (e.g. randomly generated addresses, harvesting email addresses from public webpages (e.g. forums, social media, etc.), etc.) often with headers falsified to obscure the actual sender, misleading subject lines (e.g. “hey, Bob, it’s james”, “what do you think of this pic”, etc.) and using a variety of techniques to bypass junk mail filters (misspelled keywords, text as a picture, embedded webpage, etc.).
What you get is annoying, but legal and ethical. Spam is even more annoying, (usually) illegal, unethical, and abusive of network resources. By equating the two, you’re saying actual spam is no worse than the communications you’re describing.
Back in 1994 there was an immigration law firm in Arizona that blasted USENET with offers for its services. The firm made no effort to conceal its identity or what it was doing. In fact, the partners were quite proud of coming up with the idea.
However, that may have been the last “legitimate” spamming ever.
I vaguely remember that. Can you provide any more details?
IIRC, a backlash arose against them in the USENET community, with much talk of black-listing them and configuring USENET nodes to filter out their spam – and they responded by getting nasty and threatening to sue anybody and everybody, with the result that they just got everybody even more pissed off.
Eventually it all blew over. So I guess the USENET community won. Do you know anything about how it actually all played out? Were they just bluffing, and did they just slink away when everybody called them on it?
Definitely, I have seen it first hand. They just don’t get what they are doing.
If you include web spam (forum spam, social network spam, linkwheels, click fraud and other junk) then yes, it’s extremely common.
Web design firms that cater to small businesses often sell SEO/online marketing packages. They in turn outsource to spammers, who do all of the above and more. They generally stay away from email spam because there are generally no laws against other forms of spam, and most ISPs and web hosts don’t know how to respond to complaints about it.
I don’t believe all spam is a scam, there was a news article about some X-rated site that regularly sends out spam and makes 10’s of thousand’s of dollars a year. Annoying? Yes. Useless? Depends on whether you like that kind of porn.
I disagree with your definition.
So does Spamhaus.org: The word “Spam” as applied to Email means “Unsolicited Bulk Email”. <snip> An electronic message is “spam” if (A) the recipient’s personal identity and context are irrelevant because the message is equally applicable to many other potential recipients; AND (B) the recipient has not verifiably granted deliberate, explicit, and still-revocable permission for it to be sent.
So does Miriam Webster: e-mail that is not wanted : e-mail that is sent to large numbers of people and that consists mostly of advertising
So does wherever Google pulls their definitions from: irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the Internet, typically to large numbers of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc.
unwanted or intrusive advertising on the Internet.
So does Oxford Dictionaries.com: Irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the Internet, typically to large numbers of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc…
So does Dictionary.com: 1. to send unsolicited electronic mail or text messages simultaneously to a number of e-mail addresses or mobile phones
— n
2. unsolicited electronic mail or text messages sent in this way
You get the picture. Spam is defined as unsolicted, bulk, usually commercial email. It doesn’t matter whether you scraped websites for the addresses, forged headers and tried to scam people out of money, or if you just took their email address as part of a business transaction with them and then disregarded their preference when they selected the “Don’t email me with offers or news” button, and emailed them (and everyone else on your list) to let them know you’re having a once in a lifetime 90% off sale. Either way, you’re a spammer.
Disney keep spamming me. It wasn’t spam when I signed up for their loyalty program and consented to them adding me to their newsletter, but then I changed my mind and used the unsubscribe link. Next month, got the newsletter, unsubscribed again. Next month, got the newsletter, unsubscribed again. After about six months of that, I just started forwarding their emails to the ACMA’s “Report Spam” link, as what they are doing is illegal here in Australia. I’ve revoked consent and they are still sending me their bulk, commercial mail. Spam.
Sure. Within minutes of signing up with an electric utilities, I got junk mail and spam. So lots of legitimate companies are both spamming/junkmailing as well as selling mailing lists to each other. Nowadays, I usually ask if my email is really necessary, and most times it’s not.
Because I own a business in the construction industry, I frequently get unsolicited emails from various companies offering services to help me renew my contractor’s license. I never contacted them. I assume their email list includes all the contractors in the state. That’s spam. I get similar offers by snail mail, which is junk mail. These are not scammers. Nearly all of them are offering legitimate services and advertise by sending email blasts to everyone in their market. It’s annoying and I flag the messages as spam. But they aren’t scammers.
My former business partner wanted to do exactly what Sunspace describes. We had a very real company with very legitimate products which we marketed with many legitimate techniques.
One day someone spammed him with an offer to spam other people, and he aggressively pushed for us to try it. As I recall, he figured that only about 1 in 1000 “recipients” needed to buy from us for it to be profitable.
I argued about what an awful idea it was for a few minutes then agreed to “think about it” and thankfully it never came up again.
<tangent>
We’re edging close to debate territory, so if you want to continue this discussion we should move it to over to the Great Debates forum. if you create a thread for it, feel free to pm me the link and I’ll provide some interesting counter arguments (if somebody else hasn’t already provided them).
Oh yeah. I do website support for a bank, and our company boxes get junk mail every day from real businesses.