If spam exists it must actually work

[Solver]

Admit it, nothing that is used as much as spam is used for no reason. Obviously, if there's a ton of spam floating around on the Internet, it's not there for the sole purpose of annoying people. So, just why does it live? Because there are always people who like spam.

However, I just checked on my mail to see the most recent spam that I got.

The first message offers me some great libido-enhancing tablets. Conclusion - a percentage of people have to actually click on those and buy the pills!

Second message... surprise... penis enlargement pills. This time with a 100% guarantee. Again, someone must have bought those, or the spam message wouldn't have spread.

Third message, a more interesting one. A typical pyramid scheme offering me to make a few thousand dollars within two weeks. This is the most ridicilous one. Apparently, there are people who do actually forward the chain letter, and hope to receive money in their mailboxes... even though simple maths tells me that those pyramid schemes are total bull. Yet people participate, get burnt out, but the scheme survives?

Maybe someone has a decent explanation of these phenomena?

[yaroslav]

How many people you need to make it profitable, Solver? I think that a very important factor is the real low cost of spam, so even when only a 0.1% or 0.01% people push the link, they're happy. And maybe they win money simply by people visiting the link, not actually buyin anything.

[Solver]

The cost of spam isn't as low as it seems. Obtaining thousands of emails and sending messages costs time and bandwidth. Not to mention the fact that, under the legislation that countries are now trying to implement, spammers are risking legal issues.

And you know, I have a hard time believing that even 10 people out of a thousand would push the link to penis enlargement pills...

[Adalbertus]

The biggest part of the cost is not paid for by the spammer. The spammer sends a mail of, say, 1K which costs almost nothing. They collect addresses by some programs which are certainly not costly. I guess, it takes about two minutes of spammer's time to make 50000 to 100000 people happy with another spam mail.
It costs mainly your time to sort all the stuff out and to pick the 1% of messages you are really interested in from the waste. The spammer does give a s*** on your time (And that's exactly why I think 1 second in jail for every spam mail is just the right treatment).
And, you don't need to push the link. You'll get HTML mails which open the other files on some web server of the enlargement enterprise. Unfortunately, many mail programs interpret HTML (and worse, they don't send pure ASCII by default ).

[yaroslav]

Originally posted by Solver
The cost of spam isn't as low as it seems. Obtaining thousands of emails and sending messages costs time and bandwidth. Not to mention the fact that, under the legislation that countries are now trying to implement, spammers are risking legal issues.

And you know, I have a hard time believing that even 10 people out of a thousand would push the link to penis enlargement pills...

But can't you send one message with instruction to the mail server to send it to many people? There are still servers unprotected to spam... [only guessing]

And I though that 1 people of thousand or 1 people of then thousand [0.1% or 0.01%] surely press the link

[SlowwHand]

Currently, many people aren't working, yet they exist.
What says that to your theory?

[Adagio]

Re: If spam exists it must actually work

Originally posted by Solver
(...) it's not there for the sole purpose of annoying people. (...)

Sure it is... nobody can be that stupid to actually buy stuff from those spam mails, so it has to be to annoy people :Shame:


Ask the same question about virus. Why spend a lot of time creating a virus, that only causes harm on others, but don't bring in any money for the programmer?

[Ming]

Unfortunately spam does work. It doesn't take many people to respond out of each 10,000 sent out to make money. At almost no cost, it will remain cost efficient.

Sigh...

[SlowwHand]

Figure 1% ? That can add up to a lot of responses.

[Ming]

Figure .01% and that's still enough for most to make a profit

[realpolitic]

.01% of 100,000,000 people = 10,000 sales * $10 profit/sale = $100,000
1k Bytes * 100,000,000 people = 100GByte Bandwidth


over 4 Months
1GB / 10MSeconds = 10KB/sec

Got to go, my penis enlargement buisness awaits.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by realpolitic
1k Bytes * 100,000,000 people = 100GByte Bandwidth.

Much less than that. The spammer merely sends out one single e-mail and a list of a million people to some server, preferably one that they hijacked.

You have people selling all sorts of dubious goods, plus people trying to scam the unwary.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

If each email cost say $0.001, or $0.01 or $0.10 (not sure, need to do research about how much email say a business sends) then spam would be almost totally gone.

[Imran Siddiqui]

If each email cost say $0.001, or $0.01 or $0.10 (not sure, need to do research about how much email say a business sends) then spam would be almost totally gone.

Along with most email communications .

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

If each email cost say $0.001, or $0.01 or $0.10 (not sure, need to do research about how much email say a business sends) then spam would be almost totally gone.

Along with most email communications .

You have already paid for the bandwidth you are using (okay, maybe not you you, you freeloading student ) but the spammers aren't. That's the whole thing.