Are You Paying for Spam?

How many spam emails do you get per day? For some the numbers run up into the hundreds. For others it may only be a few. For everyone it is annoying! It wastes your valuable time and it can be very aggravating. A lot of the spam is out right disgusting. Adult web sites and products account for a huge percentage of the spam being sent. As a parent, if your children have email accounts, it is a pretty scary thing to think that they too are getting this material in their emails.

So who pays for sending all this spam? Traditional junk mail (snail mail) is paid for by the sender. They have to put a stamp on it or pay for postage before the post office will deliver it. With spam that is not the case. Spammers can send out thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of emails quickly and cheaply. As an Internet Provider process's more and more email they must continuously upgrade the equipment to meet the increased traffic that they are processing. This costs them money ! To cover the costs of this they must charge you more per month. So who pays for sending all the spam? You do !

So what can someone do about it? That is a tough question. I am not sure that there is anything that any one individual can do by themselves that would have any noticeable affect on the amount of spam that spammers send. However there are things that everyone as a whole can do that will have some impact. Before we look at this lets talk about why spammers spam.

How do spammers make money ? Do people really buy anything from these emails? Sure they do. Recently The USA Today reported the following, "The Direct Marketing Association (DMA), whose members include bulk e-mailers, said last week that 37% of consumers it surveyed have bought something as a result of receiving e-mail." Think about that, if a spammer sent out 1 million emails (they can buy that many email address's on a cd for around $25.00) and 37% of the recipients bought from them, they would have 370000 customers. And it only cost them $25.00 plus whatever they pay for their internet access. Maybe those numbers are inflated considering the source, "The Direct Marketing Association", but even if only 1% bought something the spammer would still have 10000 new customers from the same $25.00 investment.

So if no one ever buys anything from a spammer they will stop, right? Wrong! Have you ever clicked on the little "Opt Out" link on the bottom of the email ? Have you ever gone to the spammers web site and told them not to send your email address any thing else? Guess what you just did. You have confirmed to them that your email address is a valid address. Sure they may never send you anything again. But once they compile a list of valid email address's they can turn around and sell that list to other spammers for a pretty good profit. There is probably as much money to be made in selling the email lists as there is to made in selling an actual product.

So what does one person do to stop it? Well, as part of the collective group of EVERYONE who uses email, you should NEVER, NEVER, EVER buy ANYTHING from a spammer. Even just one sale can justify the cost of sending out thousands of emails. As annoying as it is don't fall for the 'Opt Out' option. You are better off just deleting it as it comes in.

There are products that you can purchase that will help you control what you see in your inbox. Just remember that these products won't stop the spam from coming in, they will simply hide it from you so you don't have to deal with it as often. Even these products can't stop it all. Spammers are way ahead of the game and continue to develop new strategies to make sure that you see their pitch. Soon we will be reviewing several of the different software packages and strategies that are on the market to help combat this issue. Some of them are free, some of them cost money. Great just what we need, someone else is making money off of spam ! In the mean time if you would like more information please contact us. Until next time, keep deleting away.