Now THAt'S just sad

[captain_slinky]

Going through my spam folder this morning to make sure I didn't miss anyhing usefull, I clicked on one of those "WHOLESALE V14GR4 CHEAP" spams by accident and was absolutley SHOCKED to see what was inside!

Refinance your Home Loan Now! We are the Home Loan Refinance Experts we'll get you the lowest rates available!"

Now that is just SAD. Some poor spammer out there put a lot of thought in to this! "Gee, the response for our Home Loan Refinancing is really, really low... if only we could get people to open our e-mails and take a look, Im SURE they'd be interested! But how to get them to open our spam? Oh if only we had the same alure of those Viagra spammers... EVERYBODY opens THOSE e-mails! Hey, waitaminit... what if we *pretend* to be an ad for Viagra? By Gawd, it's just crazy enough to WORK!"

Comments

[amberlorien.livejournal.com]

What I find amazing is that spam exists. I can see it starting but wouldn't companies/people stop doing it when they realize no one is going to buy crap from their mail or it never gets opened anyway because it's routed to the junk folder?

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

It all boils down to money. Sending out Junk Mail via regular postal mail costs around 27-cents per potential customer to produce and mail, so if you dropped $20k on a mass-mailing you had to expect little more than one-tenth-of-a-percent of your parget demographic responding in order to make a profit.

Now move that in to The Electronic Age, where the cost to produce and mail your message is infinitaly miniscule if not absolutely free because all you need to do is go to a public library, open a Yahoo mail account and type-up a message, send it to everybody in the world. If evn just *one person* out of the bazillion e-mail addresses you try gets through, you've made money!

When you're a Spamer, your odds of actually getting money from spamming is about the same as your odds of winning The Lottery. nly the ticket is free. And The Lottery brings in billions of dollars every month.

(i had to learn all about this stuff in my previous job. Hope you don't mind the lecture!)