SPAM is hurting business
Posted on December 7, 2005
There are several definitions of SPAM, but no matter how you put it, it’s about having tons of unwanted e-mail advertising for some product in your inbox. With estimated earnings of $1 billion a year, its no wonder that SPAM is thriving either done by aggressive marketers or by cyber mafia. Dating from the early 90’s SPAM has evolved to super technical approaches.
To understand SPAM and how this hurts your business, let me talk a little about what spammers really want. First, its an advanced technique of social engineering that is designed to make money in 2 basic ways:
- Selling legal products or services
- Selling illegal products and being the cover up for a more dangerous activity like drugs, porn or violence
While some include in the motives range advertising concepts and ideologies, I don’t think that terrorist formations or other groups will use spam as a weapon in their fight.
Even from this point its obvious how spam can hurt your business. Due to the ever changing spamming techniques and to a not so clear legislation on this subject, more and more legal commercial e-mails are considered as spam and can compromise the chances of developing new businesses in places were e-mail is widely used as a communication method. I believe that something like 90% of my e-mails never get to be read as they are either stopped by a spam killing machine or software or because the receiver ignores the message due to the amount of spam he receives. Its really hard to say what is a real business e-mail or not, and in my opinion the situation is much worse in the last 2 years with the raise of poor countries as workforce suppliers in IT. Furthermore, just a few weeks ago, I’ve heard some comments from a colleague that “Your e-mail looks like spam - nobody will read it” which actually means that is harder and harder to notice real business from cybercrime as spammers develop techniques to make their messages look real around the clock.
Understanding the sources that spammer use to gather their e-mail addresses is probably the first step to do in order to avoid the implications of the cybercrime on your business. But let’s talk about this a little later.
Surf safe!
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I sift through a good deal of spam that evade filters.
I’d say the chances are greater that I’ll read an e-mail if it’s clear who it’s from, and it’s from some outfit I recognize.
Companies that have their e-mail address on their websites, without any munging, are likely to get their e-mail addresses harvested. Which means a lot of spam.
They’ll benefit from a specific Subject field they can sort by, so customer e-mail doesn’t end up in the spam bin. The easiest way to accomplish that is by using an e-mail form. But of course, the smaller companies who barely have an internet presence, may not know these things, and may ignore legitimate e-mail.