CANSPAM's Effect on Marketing

[HillsCap]

Well, it's official.

Just in case you were wavering on whether the National AntiSpam Registry (N.A.S.R.) was a scam company, we can now say officially that it is.

The Spamhaus Project (a spam-fighting entity) has listed N.A.S.R. as one of the scams to watch for.

You can see it here:
http://www.spamhaus.org/removelists.html

[Gary Golden]

Just a few short months ago I had e-mail campaigns and have come to the conclusion that however innocent your intentions are people do not like recieving email that they have not asked to recieve and even some of those are not appreciated.

I even had one person that I asked if he wanted to exchange links and he stated he does not exchange link with sites that e-mail, I thought how are you suppose to exchange links! Of course his site does not have any visitors anyways but the point is forum's like this are the best way to exchange links, I do not bother with e-mail except for people who sign up to recieve them and then only on sporatic intervals.

I delete the majority of my mail with out even opening it as their is so much junk, people try anything to get you to open their mail even calling you old friend.

It is a shame that there are so many people that abuse e-mail hurting the people that just send out an occasional mail about their site, but such is business.

I now put the information that I was going to e-mail in the form of informational pages thus giving me a broader base of keywords to bring the search engines to my site. Seems to work!

Good Luck to All!

Gary

[HillsCap]

Well, after fighting a glorious and bloody, nearly 24-hour-a-day battle with the insidious spammers, it appears as though peace is finally settling across the land.

The body count:
14 spammers disconnected from their email providers,

12 spammer sites shut down,

1 particularly stubborn spammer DDOS'd off the face of the earth (I know, DDOS is a bad thing, but when the enemy is worse, you have to weigh your options). His ISP (a known spammer-friendly ISP) was warned by the upstream provider to clean up their act,

3 spammers down because someone (I wonder who?!) downloaded several gigabytes of data from their websites and ran their hosting bills up. (You'd be amazed at how expensive bandwidth is in Russia.),

1 virii-spreading site shut down.

Me? I guess I'm on the 'vehemently, frothing-at-the-mouth, do not ever send spam' list. I haven't gotten a spam for 72 hours, and if I ever DO get another spam, I'll take a special interest in that spammer. I'll make him my special friend. He'll get to know me really well.

For once, I don't cringe when my computer makes that distinctive noise that signifies new mail.

Life is good again.

[clivemcg]

I take it that you won't be interested in my latest Spam Busting affiliate program then? :-)

Can we get back to basics, or start a new thread, if I come across a cool bit of Freeware and e-mail you to tell you about it am I spamming you? (as I don't know you).

If I e-mail every web design company in the Open Directory, linking to that freeware and pointing out, honestly, that the e-mail is a one-off (but nonetheless providing an unsubscribe link) is that Spam?

If I try and interest you in a product that I feel relates to your business should I be attacked/penalised in the same way as if I was promoting a Vi@gra supplier, FR*E*E penile enlargement offer etc. etc. and was using a spam list of 100,000+ e-mail addresses.

Do you write back to, complain about, the junk letters you get in your real world letter boxes - No you just bin them! But we all take it more personally if it's our Inboxes don't we? I know I do!

But there's a danger here that anyone promoting or marketing ideas or products getting lumped in with the toe-rags that just churn out the same old crap to us all.

It amazes me that they bother - I just can't imagine that the financial returns, if any, justify their outlay in time and money (I guess spam lists cost money).

[matauri]

Actually Spam does cost money to recieve. Many people have download caps, and most spam can be large email file sizes. Who in their right mind would rather rack up their download mg's with spam when they can use it on soemthing else? Excessive & uncheked spam can cost the user mega $$'s annually by being charged per mg for going over their allotted limit.

Also, as a web designer, if I want to know new technologies or products, that is my responsibility to look for them. If the product is meant to be such a good product, then the person marketing the product would market it effectively enough that I would hear about it anyway through other sources.


Cindy

[TrafficProducer]

true spammer that is now looking for loopholes in the law.

Quite a number of Spammers just ignore any laws.

The make sure the Law can't effect them. They employ other to send the Spam so the Top Spammer Bosses stay clear of court.

[HillsCap]

Actually, I take a bit more lax attitude on spam than Matauri does.

I work in the Futures Trading field, so any email I receive pertaining to trading futures I don't count as spam.

But then again, we're a very small industry. Most of us know (or know of) everyone else.

And, we're the most highly regulated financial industry in the U.S. We've got the CFTC, the NFA, and our own local Compliance Officers to answer to.

So, if any of us steps out of line, we could very well lose our Series 3 license, which would mean that we're out of the industry world-wide. It's illegal for Series 3 licensed brokers to do business with any broker who is not Series 3 licensed, no matter what country they're in. That effectively locks out anyone without a Series 3, because they don't have access to the Clearing Firms, the trading pits, etc.

So, we're a very well-behaved industry in regards to marketing, and I haven't received even one spam (i.e.: forged headers, no unsubscribe, etc.) from a Series 3 licensed broker.

Besides, there is constant evolution in trading methodologies and techniques... so it's good to hear from other industry participants as to what they're doing and what's working.

Now, if only we could clean up the Stock Scam Pump-n-Dump spammers... but that's a different industry altogether.

Oh, I did receive a couple of spams yesterday!

One was an obvious dictionary spam (they are deriving their email addresses by just incrementing through the alphabet to compose different words for the email address prefix, then applying those prefixes to a list of email address suffixes.) Amazingly, they provided a working telephone number and a valid physical address in Florida. Obviously a newbie spammer. Let's hope that they learn their lesson not to spam, rather than escalating to forged headers, spam relays, redirected websites, and the cloak of anonymity.

The other was a 419 scam. I took the usual measures... I filled the email address they provided with about 20 MB of junk, so if anyone is stupid enough to actually respond to these scammers, they'll get their message bounced. Then I reported to the State Attorney General, the ISP, the mail provider, and an organization devoted to tracking down the scammers behind the 419 scams.

I haven't received any spam so far today.

Oh, and thanks to Brittany for reducing the size of the image above (my rolling monthly spam receival rate). Keep in mind that I update that image on a regular basis, so people can keep up with how my fight against spam is going. If you want to access the image directly, it's here:
http://www.hillscapital.com/images/spamrate.gif

[John Glube]

Email Usage Down. Consumer Mistrust Up. Spamming Remains Viable.

The Pew Internet & Life Project released a study on St. Paddy's Day which is revealing.

The highlights are as follows:

"The distress of Internet users at spam has increased in recent months and growing numbers of Internet users are becoming disillusioned with email, despite the first national anti-spam legislation which went into effect on January 1.

A new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project between February 3 and March 1, 2004 shows the following:

# 29% of email users say they have reduced their overall use of email because of spam. That figure is an increase from last June, when we found that 25% of emailers were reporting a reduction in their email use.
# 63% of email users said that the influx of spam made them less trusting of email in general. That figure is higher than the 52% of email users who reported declining trust in email in June.
# 77% of emailers said the flood of spam made the act of being online unpleasant and annoying. That is an increase from the 70% of those who said in June that spam was making online experiences unpleasant and annoying.
# 42% of email users said they were aware that Congress and the Administration had approved anti-spam legislation and that it had gone into effect at the beginning of the year.

In all, 86% of email users reported some level of distress with spam.

The impact of the CAN-SPAM legislation is mixed, but not very encouraging so far. The vast majority of email users report no change in the volume of spam arriving in the in-boxes of either their personal or work-related accounts. A slightly larger percentage of email users report their volume of incoming spam has actually increased rather than decreased since January 1. At the same time, some email users say they are getting less spam both in their personal email accounts and in their work accounts.

Fully 71% of those with email accounts report that they have received pornographic spam. And the one area where the CAN-SPAM Act seemed to be having a somewhat clearer effect involved porn. Of those who had gotten pornography in the past, 25% say they are getting less porn spam now. That compares to 16% who say they are getting more and 56% who say they notice no change. The CAN-SPAM Act explicitly states that pornographic spam must be identified by the subject line as containing adult content in the message.

The CAN-SPAM Act was approved by Congress last year and signed into law on December 16. It went into effect on January 1, 2004. The law attempts to regulate rather than ban the practice of spamming by requiring email marketers to include legitimate return addresses and opt-out information in all the unsolicited messages that they send. The statute outlaws fraudulent spam, where spammers lie about who is sending a message, what material the message contains, and from where the email originates. It is common for spammers to commandeer others’ computers to send their messages. Those who commit such frauds can now be punished with prison terms and heavy civil penalties. Several major Internet Service Providers just filed suit against alleged spammers using these provisions of the law.

The Pew Internet Project survey showed that in behavioral terms most demographic groups felt the impact of spam equally. For example, equal proportions of men and women, whites and blacks, young and old, rich and poor say they use email less because of spam. But in attitudinal terms, the problems with spam are not evenly distributed. Women are more likely than men to report serious levels of declining trust in email and say that the influx of spam made being online unpleasant or annoying for them. At the same time, younger Internet users (those between ages 18 and 29) were the least likely age group to report a lower level of trust in email.

There is new evidence in the survey, though, that spamming remains sustainable as an “industry” because people continue to respond, although we find here that some figures have actually dropped a bit since our last survey. Some 9% of email users say they had responded at one time or another to an email offer only to find out it was phony or fraudulent. Online minorities and those with lesser amounts of household income and education were the most likely to report this. In addition, 5% of email users said they had ordered a product or service that came to them through an unsolicited email. That translates into more than six million people. Furthermore, 3% of email users said they had provided personal information to those who sent them unsolicited emails.

The national phone survey covered 2,204 American adults, of whom 1,371 are Internet users. The margin of error on data involving Internet users is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project is a non-profit, non-partisan research organization that is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts to examine the social impact of the Internet. It does not advocate policy outcomes."

(The bolding is mine.)

To read the full survey use this

In essence, what we are seeing is a continued degradation of email use and the Internet consumer experience for consumers due to spamming.

At the same time, even though the percentage of people responding to offers is dropping, spamming apparently remains a viable industry.

When, oh when will the DMA get the message, wake up and smell the coffee?

Kind regards,

John

P.S. To voice your views with the FTC on the Can Spam Act, use this for the details.

John Glube
Toronto, Canada

[HillsCap]

Everybody remember the N.A.S.R.? Well, in addition to scamming people, they've taken to spamming people, as well!

Read about it here:
http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?p=82911#82911

Not to worry, I've gotten the large search engines involved, and they're reviewing whether N.A.S.R. should remain in their indexes. In addition, Google is reviewing whether or not scam/spam sites should be allowed to run AdSense ads.

But, we all need to do a fresh round of articles about this company, to ensure that people don't get scammed by them. The response when N.A.S.R. first surfaced was phenomenal, with articles being written about them on a myriad of websites. I'm sure this saved some people from getting scammed.

Remember the National Anti-Spam Registry (http://www.nationalantispamregistry.com/?id=SCAM) is a scam. Avoid them.

[trsiyengar]

It is not only the spam & spoofs one is concerned, but the damages it brings alongwith each mail. Forget about the porn and viagara. The spywares and viruseus that are attached to each spam mail that is causing more concern.

In many cases, these spam mail caused damages to extent of making your stupid machine to a true junk! Data loss and hard disc crashes are order of the day, for every junk mail reciever and general internet surfers.

How effective are the laws can be judged by the increase in these sort of mails. If one door is closed, then there is another door open, to manipulate - oh, its true for the scamsters, spammers and spoofers!!

Namasthe Everyone,
TRS Iyengar
You cannot single handedly fight the criminals, just because the Law Joins them at every junction called loopholes!