Spammers Change Tactics… again
“Spam in the place where I live (ham and pork)
Think about nutrition, wonder what’s inside it now (oh boy)”
That’s how Weird Al’s SPAM begins. Little did Al know how the use of the word “SPAM” would change.
When we hear the word spam today, no one thinks of mystery meat, instead we all roll our eyes and maybe sneer a little at the thought of the junk that pollutes our inboxes. Statistics taken in 2006 estimate that 40% of ALL email is spam, and that number will increase to 63% in 2007. The rise of spam is one of the reasons some are speculating e-mail is on its way out.
The way I see it there are two major reasons spam is here to stay, at least for as long as email is around. First of all, it is effective! According to the statistics mentioned earlier 8% of users have actually bought something from spam. If you use the same statistics and assume 12.4 billion spam messages per day, with 6 per user per day, that’s approximately 2 billion users who receive spam. That’s approximately 160 million users per day who actually buy something from spam!! What kind of idiot would give up that kind of market?!?
The second major problem with spam is that spammers are real people who actively change their tactics. It’s nearly impossible to get an email address today that doesn’t offer some kind of spam filtering. And as the spam filters get smarter, so do the spammers. Some of the techniques spammers have used in the past to get around filters include misspelling words likely to be blocked, and more recently embedding images into the emails that have the ads in them. Spam blockers have grown smarter as a result and are managing to block these junk emails as well. So once again tactics have changed.
The most recent change in spammer activity is to include PDF’s with professional looking ads in their emails. Some corporate spam blockers have began blocking all emails with attached pictures, but the PDF format is ubiquitous in the business world. Blocking all emails with PDF’s would be disastrous. I started noticing these emails coming in last month, and apparently it has become a wide-spread tactic.
So what do we do about SPAM. I don’t like it, I’m sure you don’t, so what can we do to get rid of it once and for all? The power is in your hands! The way I see it, the only way to stop SPAM forever is to cut off the revenue generated from SPAM, and the only way to do that is for YOU to stop buying stuff through SPAM. I know I’m not, so it must be you. So just STOP IT and the world will be a better place!
