What Should We Do About Spam?
I receive over 50 emails per day. Usually, close to 45 of them are spam. For the uninitiated, unsolicited marketing
emails are considered spam. The amount
of junk email being sent has spiraled out of control. Some people receive over 100 unsolicited
messages per day! For the purposes of
this article, we are going to examine the different methods employed by
marketers to steal your email address, and whether or not anything can be done
to put an end to spam once and for all.
Most of the marketing messages I receive in my inbox are
sexually explicit, but I still like to look at them because some of this junk
is actually quite entertaining. My
personal favorites are offers to purchase discounted Canadian Viagra, ads for
pornographic websites, bogus work-from-home programs, or quotes for 50 year
mortgages.
How do these idiots get your email address in the first
place? One way they can get it is
through opt-in email. When you order something online, as part of the subscription
or service that you signed up for, you may have inadvertently or unknowingly
agreed to receive offers via email from that company in the future. As a
result, said company begins to send you offers via email. This is perfectly
legal as long as the company provides you with a way to unsubscribe from their
mailing list. If they do not provide you
with a means to unsubscribe, then the emails they are sending you are
considered spam.
To make matters worse, spammers will often sell your
email address and any other information you submitted to them to hundreds of
other companies who are looking for leads or mailing lists. Before you know it,
your email address has been circulated far and wide to almost every online
business imaginable. Once this happens,
there is almost no way to protect your email address ever again.
Another common way senders of spam get their hands on
your email address is by first purchasing a list of email addresses from
someone else, and then sending a joke or an interesting cartoon to everyone on
the list and ask that you forward it along to all your friends and relatives.
Once you forward the message, the spammer actually has a program that can copy
the list of addresses that the message has been forwarded to and send it back
to him or her. So now, that person not only has your email address, but also
has the email address of every one you forwarded the message to. Using this
tactic, email marketers can grow their list of email addresses exponentially.
Another popular technique is known as harvesting. This is accomplished by writing a simple
programming function that searches through every web site listed on a search
engine for a certain keyword, and then quickly scanning each of those sites for
any email addresses that are posted there, and subsequently sending them back
to the spammer. An example of harvesting would be a program written to scan
every website listed on Google for a certain keyword, such as real estate
agents, and then recording every email address that is found on the web sites
that come up in the search, and emailing the entire list of email addresses
back to the harvester. Using this technology, it is possible to acquire
thousands of email addresses in an hour or less.
Harvesting has become a legal dilemma, because the email
marketing community feels that it should be allowed to harvest email addresses
that are posted on public websites because, in their opinion, if someone has
posted their email address for all to see, then other people have the right to
contact that person and ask them questions or send them offers. However, web
sites where email addresses are posted have threatened legal action against
anyone that copies addresses and uses them to build mailing lists or send spam.
Unfortunately, these web sites really have no way to prevent this email theft,
and it will only get worse in the future.
Spam is here to stay, because it is nearly impossible to
prevent. Both big businesses and small businesses have a strong incentive to
send bulk email, because it costs nothing, and is a valuable tool for
increasing their customer base. Sending regular mail or hiring telemarketers
costs a lot of money and is ineffective. As a result, most companies would
prefer to send massive amounts of email versus paying a telemarketer or
spending money on postage to send offers through the mail. So, we should all
expect to continue to receive enormous amounts of spam in our inbox for years
to come.