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Why Spam Doesn’t Work

Masha Geller of MediaPost thinks she’s figured out why response rates to spam — um, “email marketing — are so low:

Email marketing company Silverpop yesterday released the preliminary findings of a study they conducted on response rates to permission email and found that one of the most overlooked causes of reduced response rates is “broken” or unreadable HTML. …

Here are some other reasons that occurred to me in just the last 24 hours:

If I had some domain names to register, I’d rather use .COM or .NET than .US or .NAME or .OBSCURE or whatever it is that you’re selling

The cheapest airline tickets are likely to have restrictions I wouldn’t like, even if they are totally guaranteed

Spying on my neighbor’s hot teenage daughter or on our babysitter would be just plain sick

I can’t fire my boss because, well, it just doesn’t work that way

I have more than enough printer ink for now

I haven’really been much interested in farm animals since I was 5 or 6, so I’m not going to go to your web site to look at photos

I don’t believe I can grow rich without doing anything of value

I don’t know what HGH is and I think I don’t care

While I’m flattered that you are impressed by my financial standing, I have more credit cards than I use

I read Nabokov’s Lolita and was quite disturbed by it, so I’m not interested in having Lolitas delivered to my inbox

Yes, my teeth are yellowing (how did you know??), but I’ll check with my dentist instead of buying whitener over the Net

I’m fortunate in not needing a debt reduction program

My wife’s not complaining

Nope, I still don’t need any HGH

I’m an animal rights type of guy so I don’t want a leather coat

Thanks for noticing that I am rather sexy, but sex with women less than half my age isn’t really all that appealing. Besides, if you can see that my teeth are yellow, why can’t you see the ring on my finger?

I’m not interested in toner cartridges that don’t come with HGH, whatever that is

I would have helped you get your money out of Nigeria, but how can I trust an email that doesn’t properly close all of its HTML tags?

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One Response to “Why Spam Doesn’t Work”

  1. Hi David,
    Are you still looking for an anti-spam filter? I think you were looking for something that’s reasonable for a non-geek to install when I saw you chat at Wordsworth in Harvard Square.

    If so, I recently found a nice open-source program that sits between your email client and server..you train it on examples of email to categorize incoming msgs.

    It’s called PopFile and it’s at, http://popfile.sourceforge.net/. It’s free, open-source, cross-platform and has worked for me quite nicely. Most importantly, it has an installer and well-written documentation.

    Never have gotten a letter from Nigeria, but did once “lend” someone $5 in a rest stop on 95 in NJ… as a social experiment to see if they’d mail it back as promised (they didn’t :)

    Thanks for hosting the “fool me once” video. Can’t believe the # of google hits I get on that.

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