People Are Still Spam Suckers
from the that's-why-it-keeps-going dept
If no one paid any attention to spam, it would go away. So, the fact that we still get inundated every day suggests that enough people continue to respond to spam. While not everyone is buying from spam, a new report suggests too many people still click on links within spam, which usually have tracking tags, indicating that you're a live sucker who actually pays attention to spam.
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No Subject Given
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It's not just the links
My sister had a horrible spam problem. To help her I replaced Outlook Express with Thunderbird to take advantage of the built-in Bayesian filtering and turned off the automatic display of images unless the sender was in her address book. The filtering made sure she saw fewer and fewer spam emails, but after a while there were fewer spam emails being sent to her at all. I think the fact that these images were no longer being requested was a factor in that.
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Re: It's not just the links
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harder to detect spam now
When they spoof the sender address with a real acquaintance and use on topic titles and text, it is not easy to distinguish before opening.
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No Subject Given
It calls to mind a 1950's science fiction prediction from CM Kornbluth's short story "Marching Morons": (Galaxy, April, 1951).
His premise was that technology will culturally divide society into the adept, and the clueless.
The diminishing numbers of the adept are stretched thinner and thinner,
trying to maintain the ease of life (usability?) for the ever growing masses of the clueless.
As Yogi Berra commented: Deja-vu all over again.
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No Subject Given
While I could believe that people click on links by mistake, I don't think they are buying by mistake so it looks to me like the survey's data is a bit questionable...
Or, could it be worse and 10% of the population are lawyers ordering screensavers?!
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Where'd that "10%" come from?
As for the number of people who click on spam, remmeber that they can count me if, one time out of 10,000 (say, once a month), I was fooled or my mouse went astray. And popups sometimes pop up just as you're about to click on what they are about to cover.
- PB
http://precision-blogging.blogspot.com
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