NONE: Re: ONLINE-ADS>> e-mail marketing the right way
Re: ONLINE-ADS>> e-mail marketing the right way
BULMASH.COM Sales (sales_at_bulmash.com)
Thu, 21 Aug 1997 12:36:54 -0800
I may have come in late on the unsolicited e-mail/spam argument, but I
would like to throw in my two cents as I receive quite a bit.
ANY webmaster is going to get a certain amount of unsolicited e-mail,
and I believe that certain types are okay. Let's say that some guy,
with a site similar to yours, wants to ask if you'd be interested in
trading reciprocal links. You may not have invited such requests
explicitly, and thus the e-mail is unsolicited and technically of a
commercial nature, but I doubt that if the person sending it had
really taken the time to look at your site and wrote you a personal
letter, that you're going to call it spam.
That's basically where I draw the line. Any unsolicited e-mail to
which I will respond politely, even if I'm not interested, must be
personal and not just personalized. If it merely says "Hey, Greg" and
then goes into a form pitch, I'll throw it away or send it to the
appropriate abuse dept.
If the letter is from someone who got my name off a list and is
sending me a bulk-mailed letter, it goes into the bit-bucket. Most of
the time I can spot them before opening the letters, either due to the
subject or the obviously false return address. The only time I get
really pissed off is when someone has put a deceptive title on the
letter to get you to open it, like "Don't I know you from..." Of
course, when I open it, I find them saying "I'm sorry I tricked you,
but you'll be happy I did because I've got a way you can earn $50,000
in six weeks."
Besides having my address being gleaned from net directories and people
running bots through my site (when spam comes to certain addresses that
were only listed in one of my columns for the purposes of sending me a
specific kind of information, I know it was a bot). I also decided to
do a little usenet experiment to track spam-sources.
I called it my "Great Spam-Magnet" experiment. I created 9
addresses under my domain, then I posted a message to each of 9
newsgroups, using a different address on each to see which newsgroups
were being most actively harvested with products like floodgate and
its ilk. The results were not surprising. The most actively spammed
addresses were the ones used on alt.business.home.pc and
alt.business.multi-level (get rich quick schemes and MLM business
opportunities). The next most spammed... alt.sex (you know what type
of spam that generates). After that, alt.html and
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html respectively (primarily from
directory submission services and people promising to tell me the
secrets of how to increase traffic to my site for only $39.95). The
next most spammed after that... alt.personals (with a wide variety,
most of them having to do with sex or 1-900 voice personals). After
that... alt.gambling (handicapping systems, lotteries, get rich quick),
then alt.test (almost exclusively Make Money Fast, because they think
they're catching the newbies, I guess). The only newsgroup that
generated no spam was alt.food.
-Greg
The WASHED-UPdate! As Seen in People, Newsweek, Us, and Wired!
Online media kit: <http://www.bulmash.com/washed/sponsor.html>
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