SPAM Does Work.

In the offline word, someone opens a directory and harvests peoples names and addresses from it and sends them a promotional letter - and its called guerilla marketing! People like Gary Halber, Dan Kennedy et al teach this tactic.

You try doing the same online - and you are a villain.

The problem is ofcourse as Michael said: its too cheap and easy to send emails. And so every tom dick and harry starts spamming.

One way to prevent people from spamming is to make it expensive. To start charging for sending emails. But there are ways around it. Buy your own lines. Setup your operation in China.

Another way is to make the spammers realize how it feels when they are the target.

A spammer from NewZealand stopped sending spam once his address was posted on some internet forum. People started calling him in the middle of the night and then he realized how it feels when you send a bad message at a bad time.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?thesection=news&thesubsection=&storyID=3518682

Some one could setup a company that tracks down the spammers and publishes their info online. And asks people to call him up everyday for the next week. Or month.

This will be very hard to setup though. And you would need evangalists who hate spam. Who would be willing to pay long distance phone bills for getting rid of spammers. And the fight will be slow.

I doubt any single method will work though. Spammers can apply methods that make it very hard and expensive to track them.

So more than one tactic will have to be employed.


The nz spammer story