Hitting Back at Spam in All Its Forms
by Paul McGoldrick
We all hate spam. It is an invidious, virtual invasion that is unstoppable. I read an extraordinarily intelligent article today ("Who Killed Honor?" by Kristin Zhivago in the May 2001 issue of Technology Marketing) where the author expounds on the difference between "cool" and "honorable." We are undoubtedly coming out of the cool phase of dot-coms with Flash, bots, cookies, registration (none of which you will ever find on analogZONE) when being cool meant that the reader had to trust you to be honorable with your personal data, etc. Integrity is still more important than cool.
Spammers must also think they are being cool. But their essential problem is that they don't seem to understand the essentials of marketing: It doesn't matter how good your product is, if you annoy me in some way I am not going to buy it. That means that anybody who spams me is never going to get a sale from me. Added to the get-rich-quick schemes, the mortgage and home equity offers, the credit history fixers, the work-at-home for $X k per monthers, I have been deluged in recent months (at my last employer) with quite disgusting URLs that allude to forms of sexual contact and activities that my mother would, fortunately, never have been able to understand.
We are always told that trying to unsubscribe to these things is a guaranteed way of increasing the spam because you have then confirmed a good e-mail address; whether that is so I don't know but I accept it is extremely possible and the easiest method of dealing with spam is to filter and/or delete it straight away. But in reality spamming is nothing new; we have all been spammed for many years by direct mail and there, at least, is a way of hitting back at that type of marketing.
For the last few years I have routinely mailed back to mass mailers all the material I have been sent. If there is a Business Reply Service envelope included I will do all that is necessary to make sure that the complete mailing is returned. I take particular pleasure in returning mailings that will bring the recipient higher postage costs.
Do I sanitize the returns? No, my name is always left on them although I do ensure that whatever they want me sign up for is clearly not agreed to. If they had efficient mailing services they would of course remove me from their lists; they usually do not so they continue to waste their marketing budgets on a person who will never become a customer. Incidentally I have also found that some companies who don't supply Business Reply facilities in their mailings still do accept the mail and pay for it; among them (until someone passes this editorial to corporate?) is American Express.
I also return the Business Reply postcards included in magazine subscriptions -- every single one of them. I understand that magazines would want to have subscription teasers included in magazines so that they might be picked up after a one-off purchase from a newsstand, or in a copy that a airline passenger has plucked from an overhead bin, but if you already have a subscriber to your magazine why would you abuse that customer with (an average of 4 - 6) plugs in each issue? It would certainly be very easy for print runs of the publications to be controlled in two different versions, with and without the plugs.
I do feel badly about this practice of mine when the penalized organization is a non-profit; but the likes of Consumer Reports should know better. It is my money they are wasting. The same applies to things like sweepstakes from a non-profit: You have no right to misuse my donation in that way.
There is no way that I know of to ding the online spammers in the same
way as the mass mailers; we cannot even spam them back with the involved
fake addressing that is used. But when the new e-mail addresses for analogZONE
have acquired the same attention as previous addresses you will see them
changing. It won't hurt the spammers but it will keep things under better
control. That is the only honorable thing I can do for myself.