At one point a couple years ago, I was approached with an opportunity to learn the craft/business of direct mail marketing. I took a few of the introductory courses, and learned a LOT about marketing, sales psychology, and information gathering.
I also learned about the numbers games.
(Begin Boring Lecture about direct-mail marketing)
For every 1,000 or so ads that so-called "junk mailers" send out, they get one response. For every 10 responses, they get one new customer. (Bear in mind, these figures are for the well-done ads, such as the original American Express solicitation, which is widely hailed as the gold standard of direct-marketing.) So for every 10,000 ads delivered, they get one new customer. That customer brings in about $100 new revenue every year. So as long as they can get 10,000 pieces of mail delivered for less than $100, they make a profit.
And those junk-mail ads aren't random either. Whenever you fill out a survey as part of a product registration, it gets added to a database. Marketing companies gather up all that info and cross-reference it for whatever product they are trying to sell. So if my demographics research says that the product will sell best using a particular type of copy targeted at people who are:
living in the Midwest
with incomes between $45k and $60k,
male, ages 28-34,
and who have also recently purchased a lawn tractor,
I can then go to the database, and instantly pull up a list of potential mail recipients who match 90% of that criteria. If my client wants to mail the copy via USPS, I print up the copy, send it out, and collect my paycheck.
BUT: If my client wants to send it out via e-mail, it costs me and them virtually nothing, and it gets out to the same people.
So that part of spam isn't truly unsolicited. You inadvertently "asked" for it because you submitted your personal marketing info, or so goes marketing logic.
* * * * *
In the end, I decided not to get into that business, because although I could produce some darn good copy (and so said my instructors), I could never spend 3 weeks writing a sales pitch only to know that it would be thrown out by 99.999% of the people who received it, and would be hated vehemently by a goodly lot of those.
(End Boring Lecture)
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Now, for the other side of e-mail spam: Those guys frequently get paid for "click-thru" ads. When your e-mail pops up an image inline with the text, many times it's not embedded directly in the e-mail itself, but rather is linked from an online site. So even just by previewing the e-mail in Outlook or whatever, it "calls" image, which generates a web hit. That single web-hit equals some fraction of a cent for the spammer, so if 1000 people allow their e-mail client to display that image, they've gotten 10 bucks from their client. Multiply that by the hundreds of thousands of e-mail addresses publicly available from web scavengers, and you're talking thousands of dollars, for EVERY SPAM MESSAGE SENT!!!
Those guys are the ones who are in danger of clogging up the e-mail networks of the world. The ones who send out mass mailings that go to the same people 5 times in a single day with different "from" headers.
Unfortunately, there isn't much that can be done, legally speaking, since they hide behind foreign servers or use proxies or zombie systems and can't be traced.
For those people, my punishment is simple. Every day, I pluck hairs from their body, one... at... a... time.
It gives them an idea for the extremity of the irritation that we the people receive from their idiocy.
WW
