Who actually buys this stuff?

[SteveRiley]

A sampling of this evening's Gmail spam.



Who really responds to this garbage? Somebody must, otherwise we woulnd't be innundated with it. And I dunno about the rest of you, but I'm happy for tabs to remain on my browser, thankyouverymuch...

[HalationEffect]

It's a numbers game. Send 1 billion spam messages, with a sell-through rate of, say, 1/100,000 (0.001%), that's 10,000 sales right there. When your cost of sending the spam is basically zero, it's an effective marketing strategy.

The sell-through rate is low enough that most of us won't know anyone that responds to spam, yet high enough to be profitable.

[Detonate]

I don't see most of them. I have filters set up in Thunderbird to catch this stuff and delete it before it ever hits my inbox. I have read of some terrible stories about those that have been suckered by the Nigerian scams.

[HalationEffect]

I don't see most of them. I have filters set up in Thunderbird to catch this stuff and delete it before it ever hits my inbox. I have read of some terrible stories about those that have been suckered by the Nigerian scams.

On my primary email address I don't get any spam at all. I don't have, or need, a junk mail folder.

My email provider (bluebottle.com) uses a whitelist system with a challenge / response mechanism. If someone not already on my whitelist sends me an email, their message goes into a 'pending' folder on the mail server, and an automated message is sent to the reply-to address with a link that, if the sender clicks on it, will automatically add them to my whitelist and move their message(s) from 'pending' into my inbox folder. Thanks to spammers spoofing their reply-to address, they never receive the automated response message, so never add themselves to my whitelist.

I can also manually add email addresses to the whitelist, and additionally any address that I send mail to is automatically added.

I've set up my ISP-provided email to forward to my bluebottle account, so I get the benefit of zero spam on that address too.

The service costs 10 USD per year, which to my mind is well worth it.

[Detonate]

Actually, gmail seems to do a pretty good job of filtering out most of it. As does gmx mail. Almost all of the spam that I get comes to my yahoo account.

[woodsmoke]

Nice post SteveRiley!

The very first malware that I received on my computer when I first got onto high speed cable internet, was a "male enhancement product" which was put there by Microsoft!(You, have heard this but others probably have not), as a test to see how many people would click the link(it went away and did not appear again, so that was good of MS). This was revealed by my internet provider.

And, to go along with some other people's posts, that is one reason why I use an online mail system for my "public" e-mail, in particular I use Yahoo. And Yahoo has a spam filter that takes this garbage and puts it in the spam file.

My "private" ISP, did not do nearly so good a job, but then I got very little spam because there were very few people that knew the e-mail.

I now have as my "most private" e-mail, Gmail and interact with it using Kontact.

woodsmoke

[DoYouKubuntu]

Who really responds to this garbage? Somebody must, otherwise we woulnd't be innundated with it.

I've often wondered about that, too. For one thing, there's *NO* guarantee that the products are actually what they're touted to be. So that Viagra may be nothing but a sugar pill--*IF* there are any pills at all. But, more importantly, WHY would anyone buy from some random person/entity/company who chooses spam--sent to anyone/everyone, including children--to promote its "business"?

My main e-mail address--the one I wanted to make sure I kept when I had to decide on changing/not changing ISPs a few months ago--I've had since the mid-'90s, and it receives ALMOST zero spam. I've guarded it so carefully, only giving it to select people, that even after all this time it's essentially spam-free. There have been rare exceptions, but I can literally count those on one hand.

Because I've chosen to use catchall addresses on my domains, they do receive spam because ANYTHING addressed to them arrives in my mailbox, so spammers use addresses that are common to a lot of web sites, such as webmaster@blahblahblah.com or sales@blahblahblah.com and I receive them, even though I don't have mail accounts by those names. BUT, my trusty SeaMonkey does a great job of filtering this crap, so I never have to see it unless I'm checking my 'junk' file before deleting it.

[GreyGeek]

Strange. I use gmail, and I rarely get that kind our amount of spam. If I do, it is usually from my ISP email address.

[Detonate]

Most of mine comes from my my yahoo account. I get very little from any of my gmail accounts, or from my gmx account.

[jpenguin]

I have an account with GMAIL <gmail.com>, GMX <gmx.us> , & Windows Live <ins.siskiyous.edu> (my school gave me that one). Very little spam makes it to my inbox, they are all set to use IMAP. If I check my spam folders, right now there are 1292 for GMAIL, & 8 for GMX.

[SteveRiley]

It's a numbers game. Send 1 billion spam messages, with a sell-through rate of, say, 1/100,000 (0.001%), that's 10,000 sales right there. When your cost of sending the spam is basically zero, it's an effective marketing strategy.

Yeah, I know...just wanted to vent a bit

My email provider (bluebottle.com) uses a whitelist system with a challenge / response mechanism. If someone not already on my whitelist sends me an email, their message goes into a 'pending' folder on the mail server, and an automated message is sent to the reply-to address with a link that, if the sender clicks on it, will automatically add them to my whitelist and move their message(s) from 'pending' into my inbox folder.

I'm of mixed opinions about these things. It irritates me to be on the receiving end of the "click here to send me your email" responses -- but I can't figure out why...? It's really not a big deal, it shouldn't bug me at all.

WHY would anyone buy from some random person/entity/company who chooses spam--sent to anyone/everyone, including children--to promote its "business"?

Desperate, sexless loners parked in front of PCs for hours on end, playing video games and chattering away in forums. Uh, er, ah...

Strange. I use gmail, and I rarely get that kind our amount of spam. If I do, it is usually from my ISP email address.

Which is the crux of my question. Gmail used to be very, very good at stopping this crap. Apparently it still is for you. For me, not so much lately.

[HalationEffect]

I'm of mixed opinions about these things. It irritates me to be on the receiving end of the "click here to send me your email" responses -- but I can't figure out why...? It's really not a big deal, it shouldn't bug me at all.

Heh, maybe the source of the irritation is something along the lines of "If spam didn't exist / was rare, nobody would bother with prevention measures like this".