Spam is the Internet equivalent of unsolicited junk mail. However, the key difference between junk snail mail and spam is that with spam, the receiver pays much more than the sender - and the damage in dollar terms and time wasted is much higher.
Use Email to Advertise - Its Cheap and Fast
An entrepreneur in Israel decides to take advantage of the millenium and sell a wide variety of religious articles to as many different denominations as possible. Our entrepreneur knows that to send regular mail promotions to such a large audience would be expensive, arduous and time consuming. She decides to use the Internet instead. She knows that mass emailings can reach a vast audience quickly and inexpensively. Moreover, she does not have to invest in fancy printed brochures. She can attach a digital brochure that she can make herself.
Our entrepreneur checks around and learns that there are numerous companies that will sell her mailing lists of people that the companies claim actually want to receive advertisements via email. She is also contacted by several companies that tell her they can send out her mailings to the widest possible audience.
Our entrepreneur receives emails from companies offering her software that will allow her to send email to many email lists automatically. She is very happy and expects her email promotions to be extremely successful. Her emails go out, but instead of receiving orders, she receives nasty emails telling her to stop sending out spam. How upsetting! Where have we gone wrong? Isn't spam email just like bulk mailings or telemarketing? Where is the harm?
Spam Costs Recipients Money and Time
Spam is not at all like sending out bulk mail. Bulk mailers pay fees to distribute their materials. Spam is like getting mail postage due. Recipients pay for disk space charges, and longer connection times. In addition, they waste a lot of time waiting for spam to download and weeding through spam every time they check their email.
The only similarity that spam has to telemarketing is that they are both very annoying. However, unlike spam, telemarketers bear their own costs, including staffing, phone bills and other fees. Spam is like having a telemarketer call you collect and you must accept the charges - you have no choice.
Spam Causes Problems for System Administrators
Spammers often forge the delivery headers of email to disguise its origin. Hotmail has won several lawsuits against spammers who made it appear that the spam was coming from a Hotmail address. Furthermore, large amounts of junk email can clog up mail queues and seriously affect the performance of the computer that delivers your email. Junk email also congests both the Internet and local networks.
You can easily get rid of junk mail - just throw it away. Spam costs you and your ISP money to receive - even if you never even read it.
Enable will provide you with the tools you need to surf for success, both the do's and the don'ts. Spam is one of the don'ts.
Published by Israel's Business Arena April 5, 1999