In one month I’ve had 1549 spam messages, all but a handful of which were caught automatically by Google; the conversion rate must be minuscule – somebody buying something due to spam is surely rather rare? – but from the spammer’s perspective the costs are equally minuscule, so the trade continues.
Of course a lot of the products are fraudulent or otherwise not valid, so there’s another reason that spam continues; but given that GMail especially is extraordinarily spam-resistant, I wonder why they still bother.
Well, in truth, I don’t wonder much. I suspect the answer is “the spammers are dumb and they don’t care.”
Thing is: I wonder what would happen if they did care, all of a sudden? What if they started paying reasonably literate people an adequate wage to e-mail people personally and directly, and pertinently?
These would be the door to door salesmen of the 21st century – ding-dong Avon calling / excuse me Sir, may I demonstrate how to clean your carpet? Properly written, personal e-mails, bereft of fake headers, we1rd spe11ing, bad domains, included images and javascript tricks these love-missals would fly over the spam traps and straight into peoples’ inboxes… and there would actually be a conversion rate – still small, but without destroying brand reputation.
I blame the web-metrics and SEO people – the current situation lasts only as long as “page impressions” and “number of people contacted” are accepted as measurements of the value of advertising – but I won’t go too far down that route else some people might say I am proposing/supporting VRM.
But what I am saying is that – at some point – personalised spam would be unfilterable.
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