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April 10, 2007
The Fight for Inbox Sanity
If a renewed surge in spam continues its current track, 90 percent of all e-mail will be spam by the end of the year, according to a recent report. Yet the hustle to delete this spam immediately has an impact on legitimate small businesses and the users who depend on them, too, as results from our February survey indicate.
Did you know that the term spam, as it relates to those incredibly annoying messages you receive in your e-mail inbox daily, is derived from a Monty Python sketch recounting the repetitive and unwanted presence of SPAM luncheon meat on a café's menu? In the skit, as the server recites the SPAM-filled menu, a chorus of Viking patrons drowns out all conversations with a song repeating, "SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM... lovely SPAM, wonderful SPAM" (hence "SPAMming" the dialog), until told to shut up. Thus the meaning of the term, at least: unsolicited repetition to the point of great annoyance.
Anyhow, consumers are bombarded with anywhere from 254 to 5,000 commercial messages a day, according to Advertising Age. Even the lower end of that wide range translates to, well, A LOT of messages — most of which are ignored.
If you spend a good portion of your day mass-deleting e-mail — solicited or not — to retain a bit of inbox sanity, you're not alone.
In a survey included in one of our February issues of IMT, in which about 200 of our readers (most of whom work in manufacturing) responded, more than half said they receive 10 or more e-mailed product/service advertisements in any given day.
Of those, approximately 16 percent of them said 100 percent of the e-mail messages are spam — unsolicited — while approximately 18 percent of respondents said "only" half those e-mail ads are unsolicited.
Slightly more than 40 percent of respondents said they take absolutely NO action on unsolicited e-mail advertisements — that is, no calling or e-mailing the advertiser for more information, buying from them or filing the message away for a future need.
Approximately 85 percent of all e-mail messages received today are spam, according to Bradley Anstis, Director of Product Management for Australia-based Marshal's Threat Research and Content Engineering (TRACE) team.
"If the current increases in spam volumes continue in 2007, users can expect at least 90 percent of all e-mail received to be spam by the end of the year," Anstis reports.
What are marketers doing to cut the clutter?
Oddly enough, they're creating more of it. In an attempt to be heard, marketers create more types of ads and mass-blast them via e-mail, overloading the consumer with even more messages.
The hustle to sift through and delete this spam immediately has an impact on legitimate business and the subscribers who depend on them, too.
E-newsletters, for instance, enable companies to offer updates, build relationships with current clients, enhance the firm's image as experts, and reduce printing and mailing expenses. Thus they offer opt-in recipients exactly what they subscribed to: quicker, easier and timelier messages from sources that fill their needs, whether informational or special subscriber-only offers.
In fact, the same IMT survey in February found that more than half of respondents said they receive three to five e-newsletters on a regular basis (most of them weekly) — and that's only e-newsletters for their job. One-quarter of respondents said they read or print (to later read) their subscribed e-newsletters.
And more manufacturing respondents said they click on ads in e-newsletters more often than they click on ads that appear on a search engine or Web site.
Yet while e-newsletters — and e-mail marketing as a whole — continue to reap significant benefits for those businesses that do it right, there is always the issue of them being blocked out as spam when they get to the subscribers' e-mail addresses.
Ever increasing "information overload" is certainly making users reluctant to sign up for more e-mail. And once newsletters arrive in the user's inbox, they might simply be deleted as part of a ruthless mass deletion procedure aimed at the day's barrage of spam. Further, fear of spam and other e-mail abuse is keeping users from dealing rationally with e-newsletter subscriptions.
You're not alone.
If you are receiving a lot of junk e-mail messages from people or businesses you don't know, click HERE for the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC)'s anti-spam Information & Resource page.
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4 CommentsEvery day at work, I receive many emails that are junk. Emails asking me to buy drugs that I have no use for, with their names creatively spelled to escape the spam filter. I get emails to refinance my mortgage, get college degrees on line without doing any work, letters that claim I can make millions by opening a bank account in this country, but first send the writer thousands of dollars. I get emails touting penny stocks that will make my fortune if I buy today or offering the services of young women in my neighborhood.
The company that I work for, and I am sure many others do also, uses filter software that purges email messages that the software considers spam or that contains offensive words. This is the sort of message I frequently get from e-newsletters:
(Antigen for Exchange Filter Software found message, "XXX e-Newsletter: Battery Blowups ", matching KEYWORD= spam: free membership; filter. The message is currently purged. If this is a valid email please forward this email to have it released. The message, "XXX e-Newsletter:", was sent from XXX and was discovered in SMTP Messages\Inbound located at XXX Inc/XXX/XXX-EXCH.)
The spammers have learned to work around these filters by using methods such as adding dashes between letters or using numbers in place of some letters such as, V-1-A. They have also learned that if you paste in a picture of text instead of the actual text, the spam filter cannot pick up the forbidden words.
Unfortunately, the software also filters out emails that I would like to receive from vendors from whom I might make a purchase or from on-line newsletters whose email I would enjoy reading. Why does it remove legitimate emails and not much of the spam? Because the vendors and on-line newsletter publishers have not learned from the spammers, what works and what doesn't work. What words does the software consider to be spam? First, anything free, such as "free credit", "free membership" or "free product information", "money-back" (guarantee), the words "act now", "make more money", " home-based business", "life insurance", "diet or loose weight" or "best deals". One that it picks up frequently is "over 18" or "over 21" which can be anything from "over 21,000 models available" or "over an 18-month period". It removes anything considered profanity, "BIG A-S-S FANS" company, may think their name is funny but our system purges anything with their name in it. It also removes emails with the word "prize" anywhere in it.
So, these e-newsletters are usually purged before I get to see them. It has nothing to do with the settings on my computer or if they are on my white list or in my contacts. I can ask our system administrator to release them, but I get so many emails that I usually do not bother. So if you are guilty of any of the above, be forewarned. I will not see your email, never mind read it.
Remove the financial incentive for spamming, and spam will go away. There's a perfectly straightforward way to do that, though I doubt we'll ever see it used.
Most email services have a spam filter that routes suspect spam to a Junk Mail folder. Most also have a "Report Spam" function that sends a selected message to Junk Mail and notifies the service, so they can add the offender to their list of blocked senders. Why not take those things a step further, and automatically forward the spam to the Federal Trade Commission?
Every spam message has a working link to the spammer's customer (the business trying to sell Viagra by mail, etc.) The US Government has millions of computers connected to the internet. It's a simple matter to write code to extract the working links from the spam. Then each government computer can send one email message to the spammer's link demanding that they quit. In other words, launch a spam attack against the spammers!
At the very least, this approach will make it impossible for the spammers' customers to do business online. At best, it might crash their mail server and cost their ISP time, money and trouble. That would encourage ISPs to be more responsible, and punish the ones who aren't, especially in places like Russia.
April 10, 2007 2:03 PMWhile we're thinking of cleaning up e-mail traffic for the elimination of SPAM, why don't we go a much-needed step forward and extend this to annoying commercials on television? My Internet provider has a really great Spam filter and my junk mail has dwindled to a mere few. About once weekly, I get an e-mail from the provider to check suspected Spam. I delete all but one or two, for the most part.
ON TV, however, you have no choice. It gets so bad on television with repetitive and annoying commercial "messages" that I constantly have the remote in my hand with the MUTE button ready during breaks.
Currently, among the most annoying on TV are the original spot for the FORD Edge, which may have been cute one time, but is now a major irritant. Or that wonderful one about VALTREX and how HE has genital herpes, and SHE does not, and at the end he still does and she still doesn't -- it has also gone far past being just annoying. I've gone to recording my favorite programs and watching them the next day so I can fast forward through the commercials.
Breaks are far too long, and the material much too repetitive for prospective customers to think very much about buying a product that is attack-advertised 25 times in a 3-hour broadcast of a sporting event, for instance. I make it a point NOT to buy that product, and I like to contact the advertiser and tell him that.
We DO need to clean up the airwaves, up to and including telling producers of TV shows that we need more substance and less stupidity in commercial television. They continue to lose viewers and fail to comprehend why. Cable channels such as Sci-Fi channel, Discover, TLC, A&E, and other networks continue to steal viewers away from over-advertised stations. You can't even watch the credits at the end of programs to see who played that part of the person you recognized from another show and wondered who it was. Now, they have another commercial for a different show on, and they compress the credits so no one could possibly decipher them.
Pharmaceutical ads come on telling us to ask our doctor about their product, but don't tell us what it is for. Teaser ads tell us something is coming, but not what it is.
Time for the consumers to stand up and demand better service without the interruptions. Most of the telephone solicitation has disappeared due to this sort of action and legislation. I'm sure we could get something serious done about Spamming if enough constituents wrote to enough congressmen and senators complaining about not being able to use their computers due to spam. It is only through such grass-roots movements that we ever get anything positive done. The old saying that "the squeaky wheel gets the grease" is absolutely true. If we don't raise holy Hanna about this stuff, nothing will get done.
Unfortunately, there is still no law that protects us from things that are annoying. No matter how annoying they are. I suppose they can use that old defense that, if we don't like the way something is being done, we just don't use it. Like, if we dislike the TV shows that are offered to us, we simply can change the channel, or (God forbid) just turn it OFF!
April 10, 2007 4:28 PMWhat!! You mean I'm NOT gonna get $81 million from that nice guy in Africa...
April 11, 2007 3:51 PM
