New spamming techniques have been the center of dicsussion in the blogosphere in the past couple of days. But what’s even more interesting to me is the subject of why spam is even effective in the first place.
The sad fact is, spam works or it would stop being sent. If it wasn’t worth the spammers’ time to come up with new tricks to get around filters, they just wouldn’t bother in the first place. But people apparently act on the spam they receive–they buy things from Viagra to stock based on poorly-worded emails from sources they’ve never heard of. Or even wire money to a bank account to help a Nigerian official move millions of dollars out of the country.
I found an article from last year with some illuminating stats on spam buyers. Can you believe that people tend to open and read over 20 percent of the unsolicited email they receive, and OVER 40 PERCENT admit to having bought something from spam? I think that figure’s a bit high (or the definition of "spam" is wrong), because neither I myself nor anyone I know has at least admitted to the dirty deed. The 8 percent figure that keeps getting tossed around seems more likely, but even that high a figure should emberass us as a society.
My guess is that it comes down to three things:
- Lack of education about what spam is and where it comes from
- Lack of education about spam, scams, the way the world works, and an unhealthy sense of greed
- Lack of education about spam and emberassment about personal physical problems that prevents people from seeing a doctor or buying certain products in person
I see a common theme here, that being a lack of education about certain things. I’m not sure what can be done about educating people about scams, that seems like a parental job to me, or a lesson that has to be learned the hard way. But surely we can do a better job of educating people about unsolicited email. I did a quick search on "Internet 101" and none of the top sites I looked at even mentioned spam. A few talked about spyware and adware, which is also good, but nothing on spam.
However, the general public is still fairly new to the Internet and, aside from #2 above, I think spam will eventually go away as a result of people becoming more acclimated to the Internet and more educated about the way things work online. So do your part, speed the process, and tell your Internet newbie friends about spam when you see them first going online. You’ll do us all a favor and eventually we’ll get rid of the spam problem by cutting spammers off at the bank account.
