Thursday, May 20, 2004
Inside my Gmail: something I've never done before ...
I did something I don't remember ever doing before a couple days ago: I actually responded to spam received to my Gmail account asking for more information. I was showing a spammer interest! This is virtual sacrilege.
The result? No response yet!
I thought the whole point with spam was to get people that were interested. So, here I respond to some spam with interest and I get ignored? What's up with that? No, I'm not going to run down the spammer and send a follow-up email. I do wonder, though ... here I'm getting 1000+ spams a day on average and the one time, the one time I respond, I get no response.
Amazing.
BTW, I just noticed when I went to post, this blog was listed first so I didn't have to choose from the dropdown menu. Very cool, thanks Google!
The result? No response yet!
I thought the whole point with spam was to get people that were interested. So, here I respond to some spam with interest and I get ignored? What's up with that? No, I'm not going to run down the spammer and send a follow-up email. I do wonder, though ... here I'm getting 1000+ spams a day on average and the one time, the one time I respond, I get no response.
Amazing.
BTW, I just noticed when I went to post, this blog was listed first so I didn't have to choose from the dropdown menu. Very cool, thanks Google!
TD 11:12 AM
3 Comments:
I am convinced that if you respond to some of the spam, all it will do is get you on more spam lists, even if you expressed interest in whatever they are shilling. I would expect to see an upsurge in your spam load in the next 3-10 days.
I think that to a certain extent, spam is like MLM. A very few people are making any money at it, and a lot of others are trying to sell spam services to other spammers who are trying to sell spam services to other spammers, etc. ad nauseum. Heck, half the stuff they offer is illegal. If all the law enforcement folks had to do was send back an e-mail to get a real connection, most of the spammers would be in jail in 6 weeks.
Then there was the radio report I heard about collecting financial leads (for mortgages or something), and how the spammer sold the lead to someone else who sold the lead to someone who sold it to a financial services company. When the financial services company was contacted about why they were using spammers to generate leads, they said that they had strict policies forbidding this. HA! I bet the police that policy really well.
I think that to a certain extent, spam is like MLM. A very few people are making any money at it, and a lot of others are trying to sell spam services to other spammers who are trying to sell spam services to other spammers, etc. ad nauseum. Heck, half the stuff they offer is illegal. If all the law enforcement folks had to do was send back an e-mail to get a real connection, most of the spammers would be in jail in 6 weeks.
Then there was the radio report I heard about collecting financial leads (for mortgages or something), and how the spammer sold the lead to someone else who sold the lead to someone who sold it to a financial services company. When the financial services company was contacted about why they were using spammers to generate leads, they said that they had strict policies forbidding this. HA! I bet the police that policy really well.
That's what I've heard, Ed, but the spam flow seems to be at normal (high) levels and not spiking (yet). I just thought it would be an interesting experiment (since I'm using Gmail to organize the spam flow) what would happen if I actually responded to some spam that I could be interested in.
Oops, that was me, Ed - I forgot to toggle away from "Anonymous" ... why do they make that the default anway? Doh!