[ale]OT It begins...

Joe Knapka jknapka at kneuro.net
Tue Jan 27 17:07:49 EST 2004


"ChangingLINKS.com" <groups at ChangingLINKS.com> writes:

[scissors of brevity]

> Point: The spammers who would go as far as creating such a sweat shop would 
> already have the science of advertising, marketing, ROI and spamming mastered 
> (and thus less likely to make marketing mistakes like overusing a list).

One needs to "master" spamming? Overusing a list is a "mistake"? I
must get hundreds of spams a week from the same collection of yahoos
-- they're sending essentially the same crap from essentially the same
range of addresses, using the same off-the-shelf script-kiddie spam
spraying software. I ignore *all* of it, without exception.

Given the prevalence of spam, and the uselessness of trying to
separate the "wheat" from the chaff, it seems to me that spamming is a
mistake in the first place if you actually have a legitimate product
to offer, since all you accomplish is to alienate those with the
intelligence and purchasing power to pay you for your product. If you
can't see that the sheer ratio of scams-to-legitimate-offers in spam
traffic (nearly 1.00:0 as far as I can see) has completely destroyed
whatever value there ever was to email marketing campaigns, then
there's no hope for you.

I have no doubt that there are people out there who are stupid enough
to respond to spam scams, but there's an ethical issue here: just
because you *can* take advantage of those people (at the expense of
millions of others who have to deal with your shit) doesn't mean you
*should*. I have no patience or respect for anyone who would defend
the practice of spamming.

Cheers,

-- Joe Knapka

-- 
I'm gonna do everything / silver and gold / but I got to
hurry up before I grow to old... -- Joe Strummer, d. 2002.
If you really want to get my attention, don't reply to this;
instead, send mail to "jknapka .at. kneuro .dot. net."



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