Back in the ’ 70 s, when Spam was only the name of a potted meat product, British comedy troupe Monty Python could envision a cafe full of Vikings singing, “Lovely Spam, wonderful Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam...”
Now, spam is an in-box full of unsolicited commercial e-mail advertising promising to enlarge your body parts or offering can’t-turn-it-down cell-phone deals. And it’s more likely to make most people swear rather than sing.
But spam continues to proliferate because it works. People actually open those e-mails and click on the links inside.
If it isn’t you, it’s the guy in the cubicle next to yours. And the guy in the cubicle next to his may actually have bought something.
It only takes a few like him to make it worthwhile for the spammer.
“Since sending e-mail is free, such small percentages of returns are acceptable — even profitable,” explains an analysis from Yale University’s Information Technology Services (www. yale. edu / its / e-mail / spam / whyspam. html ). “The spam industry thrives on unsuspecting individuals who impulsively click on something interesting in their in box.” Spam isn’t inherently evil. Like any tool, it depends on whose hands are using it. You, the consumer, might actually get a good deal from a mass e-mail. “Legitimate marketers have the right to send a marketing e-mail to a consumer once without permission and the consumer is required to opt out,” says Elizabeth Bowles, president of Little Rock-based Internet service provider Aristotle. net and a widely recognized expert on spam-related issues. “I used to give a speech many years ago about spam being kind of like pornography — I know it when I see it. And it’s not spam if I want it. What works is, consumers don’t consider e-mails that have valuable offers to be spam.”
COSTS AND BENEFITS “You have to divide spam into a couple of different categories,” Bowles says. “Legitimate spam is an e-mail that provides a valuable offer to something that the consumer is interested in, [and ] is going to get that consumer to click on it. That does work. “ The more kind of questionable spam, I believe that they’re just playing the percentages on. If you have an e-mail list of 25 million names and you have an offer that you think that one of those people will buy, all you need is that one person buying it and you’ve made your money. Because spam is free to the sender. “ The people who are paying for that are the Internet service providers and the consumers. They’re bearing the cost of that spam, because they’re having to deliver that mail, they’re having to filter that mail, they’re having to read that mail. “ If you’re running a direct mail campaign, you want a 1 percent response rate, and you need to be sure to get that in order to make your money back. Spammers only need a [minute ] percent to make their money. They just need one person out of 10 million.”
DESIGNING THE CAN At its core, spam is the simplest and most direct form of direct marketing, a simple message that goes out to thousands or millions of e-mail addresses.
“This kind of spam is like telemarketing — both have legitimate purposes and both are difficult to stop,” the Yale report says.
“Spam is something you don’t want to receive in your e-mail, and the common understanding is that it’s unsolicited commercial e-mail,” Bowles says. “In fact, what spam is specifically is e-mails that violate the CANSPAM Act.”
The federal CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing ) Act of 2003 established requirements for those who send commercial e-mail, spells out penalties for spammers and gives consumers the right to ask e-mailers to stop spamming them.
However, aside from the definition, “We don’t think that the CAN-SPAM Act was particularly effective when it was passed,” Bowles says.
“And I believe that all of the studies have shown that the ‘one bite of the apple rule’ — everybody gets to spam until they’re told not to — coupled with the difficulties in enforcement, have pointed up that it was really not the best route to take. It was better than nothing, but in some ways it’s done more harm than good.”
One of the main problems with CAN-SPAM, Bowles explains, is that it doesn’t provide a way to get off the “core” list.
A seller with an e-mail list can sell it to an endless string of companies, and the consumer has to opt out of each company’s e-mails one at a time.
“There was no way to opt out of the master list.... The consumer [is ] not able to tell the owner of the list, ‘Quit selling my name. ’”
HOW IT WORKS There are basically three kinds of spam: Actual legitimate direct-marketing pitches for products and services sent by mass e-mail. Merchants with whom you have previously done business are also able to contact you under the law. “So if I shop at a particular store and I happen to give them my e-mail address for some reason, maybe I made an online purchase, they [can ] turn around and send me a coupon in the mail, unsolicited,” Bowles explains. “I did not give them permission to send to me. But [if ] I nonetheless like that they sent me that coupon, I’m going to click on that e-mail and I’m going to print out the coupon.” Direct marketing pitches for products and services of dubious legitimacy, such as pornography sites, alleged pharmaceuticals that enhance body parts and the like.
“You have the type of spam you receive from the Viagra dealer in Russia; I don’t believe that that is particularly successful,” Bowles says. “There may be one person in a million who will click on an e-mail that has poor English that’s obviously from overseas that looks like a piece of spam.”
Outright scams, including Nigerian inheritance offers and so-called “phishing” attempts at identity theft.
“Spam is like a game of leapfrog,” the Yale analysis concludes. “When the good guys patch one hole, the bad guys exploit another.”
Those occasional gobbledygook e-mails you get, Bowles says, are attempts by spammers “just trying to see if they have a legitimate e-mail address.” They profit by selling those addresses to third, fourth and fifth parties.
Spam is also a frequent mechanism for infecting your computer with “mal-ware” or bad software. “Viruses, Trojan horses and spyware can be linked or embedded in an e-mail message, playing on the tiny percentage of unsuspecting individuals,” the Yale report notes. “Once someone clicks, though, the software propagates and spreads to more users.”
PLAGUE OR PROFIT ? What may be a plague to you is a blessing for a direct marketer. A study last year conducted by Endai Worldwide, a New Yorkbased international online advertising and marketing firm, shows spam is surprisingly effective at doing what it’s designed to do: getting people to buy. Endai claims it got a 90 percent response rate to an e-mail questionnaire it sent out to 7, 500 people just before the semi-official start of the 2007 Christmas buying season — the Friday after Thanksgiving.
According to the survey, 50 percent of respondents actually made a purchase as a result of opening a marketing e-mail solicitation. More than 50 percent said they couldn’t resist and check their junk mail folders daily; 16 percent admitted to making a purchase from messages they found in their spam folders.
“We were very surprised by the results of this study,” Endai Worldwide Chief Executive Officer Michael Ferranti said in December. “It reinforces what we’ve believed at the gut-level all along, and that is that consumers will always be motivated to buy if the offer is appealing and customercentric.”
DO NOT CLICK Debra R. Berlyn, president of Consumer Policy Solutions (www. ConsumerPolicySolu tions. com ), a consulting firm that concentrates in online safety, stresses you should never respond to e-mails from an unknown source. “You don’t know if it’s a legitimate merchant or not,” Bowles adds. “You have no way of knowing if it’s a ‘ phish’ or a legitimate e-mail. “ My rule is, if you did not ask to get it, or you don’t know how they got your e-mail address, don’t click on it.” The folks at SpamStopsHere (www. spamstopshere. com ) go further: “Never respond to a spam message; it can lead to harassment, attempts to hack your computer and attempts to steal your credit card number or identity. At a minimum, it will lead to more spam, especially if you click the infamous ‘Click to remove’ link.”
However, the site does say you can identify the sender as a legitimate company by poising your mouse over the “remove” link to identify the domain name — the word, sometimes with dashes, before the “. com” or “. net” — and running it through another site, www. whois. net, through which you can find the name and address of the owner and, most importantly, the date when the domain was originally created.
“If e-mail is from a legitimate company, especially one that you recognize, it should be safe to click,” the site suggests. “Legitimate companies like L. L. Bean, Sprint, American Airlines, etc. are not going to send you unwanted e-mail.”
However, do not click on the link “if the owner is an individual and not a company — it is almost certainly spam.” Do not click if the domain was originally created within the last two years; if the owner’s full address and phone number are not listed, or if the owner is not in the United States, Canada or another modern country.
“Almost no spamming domains in the [United States or ] Canada are more than three years old and almost all established, legitimate companies registered their domain name more than five years ago. A spammer typically uses a domain name for only a few months.”
FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE If your goal is to get as little spam as possible, “Your first defense is to have a very good e-mail filter,” Bowles says. “You need to look closely at what your filter does for you, because some filters are over-inclusive, meaning that they take good mail and they eliminate it, and some filters are under-inclusive, meaning that bad and dangerous mail gets through.” Spammers get some of their e-mail lists from legitimate vendors, to whom individuals have given permission to share their personal information with “partners.” “ If you’re doing online shopping and you put your e-mail address in, read the fine print, ” Bowles says, “because a lot of those merchants will have checkboxes and they’re already checked, and they’ll say, ‘Such-and-so merchant can send me e-mails.’
“ I may want e-mails from Nordstrom but I don’t really want e-mails from Nordstrom’s partners. These merchants also give themselves permission to sell your names to partners and friends, and you can opt into one and not the other. Be sure to uncheck those boxes and read carefully.”
Also be very careful to whom you give your e-mail address, Bowles says.
“You may think it’s spam but you may have unknowingly asked to receive it. Especially if you enter online contests, anything like that, that’s another way to get your e-mail address and you may be opting into receiving these marketing messages and not realizing it.”
SCAM BAIT A July 2005 article in Information Week (www. informationweek. com ) reported on a survey, jointly conducted by Mirapoint, a message security vendor, and the Radicati Group, a research firm that specializes in email messaging issues, that showed 11 percent of computer users had bought something touted by spam; 39 percent admitted to clicking on the embedded Web addresses, or URLs, within spam, and 9 percent of survey respondents said they had been ripped off by spam scams.
Yet another troll lurks beneath that bridge: 57 percent of those polled who said they clicked on links also said they received more spam afterward.
“If people stopped buying products from spam, spam would probably go away,” suggests Marcel Nienhuis, an analyst at the Radicati Group.
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
