Who Is Responsible For Spam?
I hate spam. You hate spam. We all hate spam. Well, do we really? If we all complain about it, why are we still getting it? Put simply, who is responsible for spam?
Who Is Responsible For Spam?
Spam is the unsolicited email messages you receive practically every hour of every day. The messages try to get you to take some action that the sender will profit from. Whether it is a pill that will make you “bigger” or a new mortgage, all spam is essentially junk mail that most of us would rather not receive. Recently, I receive about twenty spam emails a day promoting a septic tank treatment. I don’t even have a septic tank! Uggh.
While you probably feel the same way about spam, there is something we all have to take into account. Simply put, it must work. Sending spam requires a spammer to send money, often lots of it in bandwidth, servers and other such things. If it was not profitable, they certainly would not be doing it. This fact, of course, leads us to a logical conclusion.
Who is responsible for spam? We are.
Despite all of our griping, one thing is clear. A certain percentage of us are opening junk email messages and purchasing whatever it is that they are selling. Think about that for a minute. Can you really deny it? I doubt junk emailers are sending out spam for the fun of it. Instead, they are sending it out because it is profitable!
Before you start giving people around you the evil eye, it is important to understand something. Very few people actually react to unsolicited email messages. Studies have shown a spammer sending ten million email messages is happy if he or she gets 50 to 100 sales. That is a pretty small percentage of people reacting positively to spam.
Ultimately, I firmly believe that spam will die on the proverbial vine. It will not, however, be some new law that ends it. Instead, it will simple become unprofitable to send it out. As more and more people get sick of it, fewer will buy whatever is being offered. At some point, a threshold will be crossed and our inboxes will be freed.
I have a dream, indeed.