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Spam Worries Stop Shoppers
from the don't-spam-us dept
Among all the annoyances and problems caused by spam, perhaps e-commerce providers should be taking a more pro-active stance on stopping spam. New studies suggest that people are holding back on shopping online to avoid getting more spam. Of course, the online stores deserve some of the blame, because many of them, once someone bought from them, would follow up the purchase with a barrage of unwanted emails trying to get the customer to come back and buy more. You would think, by this point, people would realize that, in many cases, such high pressure sales techniques only serve to drive away those who were happy customers before - but it seems that lazy marketers still have control over the "send" button.
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Spam Identification
I just thought of another reason email spam is different than physical junk mail (remember, spammers say we deal with physical junk mail all the time, so how different is this?).
Forgetting the fact that email spam is cheaper and easier to send, since that's been brought up before....
The big difference is when I come home and look in my pile of physical mail, I can quickly visually discard commercial mail from personal mail. It simply looks different. With email, however, it is a time consuming process requiring me to read the text of each subject line and email address... and even then it isn't always enough to differentiate it from a personal email without actually opening it. Spammers are making their subject lines and from lines harder and harder to discern from personal email.
Granted, in the physical mail world, junk mailers are getting trickier and trickier, as well - although instead of trying to make the mail look personal, they try to make it look official. But it is still easy to tell apart from "real" mail.
I don't think we'll ever have this kind of ease with email.
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Re: Spam Identification
This is the basis for the proposal that all advertising email be required to containe "ADV:" (or some variant) in the "Subject" field. Of course the spam industry will fight this because they know that almost everyone will filter these out.
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