Weekly Spam

Ovid on 2003-06-27T15:36:47

At my personal email account, I receive a lot of spam. I decided to collect all of it for a week to see how much I received:

Number of spam: 697
Total Size: 3.55 meg

That's a heck of a lot of spam. I almost wonder how it can be cost effective for them, but somehow, the spammers seem to survive.

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Cost-effective

petdance on 2003-06-27T16:12:54

It's cost-effective because the costs are miniscule. Mail out 10 million spam, and if you only get 1 buy in a million, that's 10 buys. Ten purchases (or whatever) for a close-to-zero cost is cost-effective.

Re:Cost-effective

chromatic on 2003-06-27T17:06:07

That assumes that the spammers are actually the ones selling the products. That may be. That also may not be — it makes sense to me that the ones making money are the ones selling spamming services, and the people actually selling physical products are just being ripped off.

That's just a hunch though. Does anyone know for sure?

Re:Cost-effective

dug on 2003-06-28T18:47:36

The freep.com article (http://www.freep.com/money/tech/mwend22_20021122.htm) on Alan Ralsky states:

Ralsky makes his money by charging the companies that hire him to send bulk e-mail a commission on sales.

I have no idea how many repeat customers he gets, or what his customer satisfaction is like.

Given the content and volume of spam in *my* inbox, I have to conclude that some people out there are dissapointed with their small, flacid penises that they got a bad mortgage rate on.