

Musings on Spam: What if literate people were paid to write personalised spam? - bensummers
http://dropsafe.crypticide.com/article/4324

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trimber
The actual success rate(people buying something in response to the mail) of
Spam Emails is really, really low. Its only profitable for Spammers because it
costs pretty much nothing to send millions of emails. Now, if you actually
paid someone to write these emails by hand, sure your response rate would be
better but I seriously doubt the whole thing would still be profitable.

Also, I think that personalized adds and
recommendations(Amazon,Google,Facebook,etc.) have a much higher success rate,
simply because they have more information about you and can therefore
recommend products that you are more likely to buy. Spammers could of course
also collect information about you to personalize their Spam, but considering
that most add/recommendation systems work automatically(and are pretty good),
I don't think paying someone to create these recommendations would be worth
the effort.

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jacquesm
> its only profitable for Spammers because it costs pretty much nothing to
> send millions of emails.

And because there are _still_ idiots that buy spamvertised goods and services.

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lukeschlather
The important thing is education (and not calling people idiots.) I realized
that after sharing this article as a PSA of sorts on Facebook:

[http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/idiot-users-
sti...](http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/idiot-users-still-
intentionally-opening-clicking-on-spam.ars)

I'm sure that there's an article somewhere that would serve the same purpose
and doesn't insult all of your Facebook friends.

~~~
jacquesm
Good point, thanks.

Spam is a continuous source of irritation and that shines through sometimes.

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rlpb
This already happens!

I've even received a (slightly) researched, personalised Powerpoint
presentation from a company out of the blue. I didn't buy, but interestingly I
also didn't mind. Perhaps this is because I felt that it may have taken longer
to create then it did for me to discard it.

My biggest objection to a whitelist-only system is that although emails out of
the blue are very rare, they are also far more valuable than regular emails
that I receive. Given my reaction above, I'd prefer a proof-of-work
requirement over a blanket block. This still presents an undesirable
requirement on the sender, but it would be better than a block.

~~~
c1sc0
I get these from time to time on my professional email address. It's a soft
form of a cold call & often contains information pertinent to what you are
actually doing. Somehow it creeps me out that somewhere, someone is paid to
produce these ppts. en masse. This is a job that _deserves_ to be outsourced,
yet most of the time they seem to be produced by cog21@majorcorp.com

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tomjen3
I pointed this out in an earlier discussion, but the difference between spam
and ham is only that the value of the information in spam emails is very low.

Now it would be possible to increase the value of the messages to some degree,
but the problem is that most of these offers are for medication that doesn't
work to solve issues you don't have -- and therefore the maximum value of that
is nothing, at best.

The only way to make spam worth more is to not sell scams, but sell goods that
are actually worth something, in a way that the recipient values. A great
example of this is the John Cleese Compaq ads
(<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlmzwZXa-Ww>) which adds value to the company
and the user.

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mike-cardwell
People would still report these emails as spam, and the sender IP address or
email address or domains or urls would still get added to block lists.

"personalised spam would be unfilterable" assumes that systems only filter
spam on the text content. _Much_ more spam filtering happens purely on IP
addresses and domain names.

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wooptoo
The answer to this would be a contact centered (as opposed to message
centered) emailing system, like Hobson Files is
<http://redis.hobsonfiles.com/>

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d_c
You mean copywriters?

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dejb
I think the writer just described the singularity.

