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End the Viagra Spam!
By Shalom Issenberg | September 30, 2007
Unfortunately spammers are smarter than the developers working on spam filters. Health related spam (mostly generic or natural viagra sites) make up about 50% of all unwanted emails. The government wants to stop it and large software companies are breaking their backs developing solutions; but the spam keeps rolling in.
What kills me is, there are enough fools out there purchasing these products in response to all of this spam. Those are the people that need to be punished. Forget going after the spammers, they only exist because they see success from their efforts. Individuals buying these products should be stopped! Once demand is eliminated or greatly diminished the supply would follow. Maybe it’s a bit far fetched – but so is the idea that some western government can control or punish “offshore” offenders (as we know the spam is not coming from within our borders).
What really amazes me though is that any success at all can de derived from these spam campaigns. Most spam filters work well enough to deter the old email spam messages, so spammers use a very simple method to push their messages through the gates. Instead of written content they attach images. The little content provided in the footer of these messages can be a poem or a conversation like dialogue, and email subjects are usually very personal like: “Hey remember this?” or something generic enough to make you think it’s actually targeted to you and definitely not spam (maybe a message from a friend or contact). This of course is all done to trick the filter as any mention of “viagra” or a link to a known spam site would set off the alarms. This means of course that the desperately sad individual who is interested in going to that site to buy the product needs to type the url manually into his browser.
Assuming that on highly targeted opt in email campaigns with active links, click through exists as a mere percentage of a percent. Plus conversions (or online transactions) from clicks are also a small percentage of the overall volume. Now consider that the emails are not targeted, are extremely annoying, of low quality, and low trust (with deceitful tactics), then consider that the click trough is even more drastically reduced as buyers need to type in obscure sub level urls in their browsers’ address bar, multiplied by the low overall conversion rate of their site… How successful can these campaigns really be?
Well their must be a lot of desperate fools out there – because there is more and more spam everyday!
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