On Wed, 21 Jan 2004, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> >
> >>Then again, maybe not. For example - I'm confounded if I can understand
> >>why spammers will vigorously spam people who ask to be removed.
> >>Presumably, if someone asks to be removed, he is highly unlikely to ever
> >>buy something from you. Spamming him again will only cost you the
> >>(insignificant, but still) money, with almost no hope of seeing any
> >>back. I'm not sure what this means about the above logic.
> >
> >If you ignorethem, your email address is "unconfirmed". If you reply to
> >remove yourself from the list, you are confirming your email address
> >exists and gets to a real person, which makes it much more valuable.
> >
> How is that more valuable? The precise calculation should be something
> like this:
> a - The chances that an unconfirmed email reaches a real person.
> b - The chances that a random real person will actually buy stuff.
> c - The chances that someone who asked to be removed will buy stuff.
>
> In general, for it to be profitable to not honor removal requests, c
> must be greater than a*b. I suggest that this is not the case.
> a is somewhere in the 80%.
> b is somewhere in the 0.5% (according to my rather dim recollection of
> spam news. I'm not really sure about this one).
> Are you truely suggesting that someone who sent an email saying "don't
> ever ever spam me again" is more than 0.4% likely to buy something
> advertised in a future email (meaning - buying a product for every 250
> spams received)?
> P.S.
> If anyone has better numbers, please let us know.
The major reason spammers try to avoid filters and spam people who asked
to be removed is twofold:
1. Many ISPs filter spam, so if you avoid an ISP's filters you might stand
a chance to be the one of the two spams a specific person would get,
which makes the probability of spam being read and goods bought much
higher.
2. The ones who collect the addresses are not the ones who spam, and the
collectors have an interest to sell as many addresses as possible and
call them "confirmed" or even "opt in".
Regarding your numbers, the percentage of bad addresses in e-mail lists
sold is significantly less than 80%. It's more in the 10% range, if you
remove duplicates and incorrect addresses. Studies have shown that high
percentages of the e-mail addresses sold are syntactically incorrect (i.e.
bad TLD) or include "NOSPAM" etc.
BTW: Why post on linux-il and not on [EMAIL PROTECTED] ?
Alon
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