How to put a spammer in the works of the junk emailers

YOU know the feeling. You come back from holiday and check your emails, and sitting in your inbox are dozens of messages.

“I am a popular and important person,” you think to yourself. But then you start to go through them.

There’s a message from a company you’ve never heard of, trying to sell you tickets to a VIP day somewhere, another from someone offering to get your website higher up the Google rankings, plus several from companies you bought something from once, updating you on their product range.

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And those are just the sensible ones. Also peppering your inbox are indiscriminate contacts from people selling questionable products like bedroom pharmaceuticals, replica watches, fake degrees... you name it, it’s on special offer.

And what about those heartfelt pleas from ladies who have somehow fallen in love with you based on the look of your email address, and those kind widows in Nigeria wanting to share their late husband’s business riches with you?

More sinister still are the fake notifications from banks wanting you to “confirm” your security details, or the excited messages from unknown lottery companies who reveal you’ve won a huge amount of money. And that’s not even to go into the people who are hoping you will open an attachment that will plant malicious software in your computer.

An estimated 80-85 per cent of all email traffic in the world is rubbish, or to give it its technical term, spam. Last year the spammers were busier than ever, sending out an estimated seven trillion messages.

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Spam slows the whole internet down and because sending an email is not an energy-free process, you could argue that spam is a waste of power and a contributor to climate change. But, more than anything, spam emails are simply an irritating nuisance.

So why do spammers do it and how can we stop them? The answer to the first question is because emailing is so easy, so cheap and so lacking in regulation.

The answer to the second is probably not much – but we can get our own back.

Recently I looked at a month’s worth of spam, a total of 551 emails. I put it into four categories: “cold-call” marketing from people I’d never heard of (90 messages), “warm-call” marketing from companies I’d once bought something from (51), “black market” product sells (191) and outright scams (219). I wrote to all of them in the only language they seem to understand – rubbish.

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To companies selling products and services on a shot-in-the-dark basis, I wrote trying to sell them places on a training course on how to cold-sell things to people who don’t really want them. To those I once gave an email address to by buying or donating online, I emailed asking them how they would like to receive information from me in future.

The black marketeers received a message offering them the chance to buy everything from cheap degrees to authentic fashion fakes.

Finally, I contacted the blatant scammers, offering fake love, free money and non-existent prizes.

“I live on a small island off the coast of Yorkshire and work all day in my father’s potato field,” began one. “I am a shy girl, but loyal and, I think, a little bit pretty. I am looking for that perfect man and I am certain it is you. I will come to you in my father’s boat – sadly, though, the boat is in urgent need of repair. I know you will want to help with this, so we can be together. Would you prove to me you are a true and kind gentleman by sending £1,000 (Western Union accepted), so I may have the boat made sea-worthy again?” 

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Well, it’s got to be worth a try, hasn’t it? In all, I fired off more than 900 emails to my list of 500 or so addresses and I sat back and waited. Many of the emails bounced back pretty quickly, tagged with “Failure notice”, “No such user” or “Addressee unknown”. Still, an awful lot of the messages did seem to go somewhere, bravely taking their place among the seven trillion.

A week later I assessed my results. I’d had just one reply to 900-odd messages – from a theatre in north London, one of the warm-call marketing people.

They made it very clear that they didn’t feel very warm towards me. After this experience I feel spamming must turn in pretty poor results, although of course I sent out just a few hundred messages while spammers send out thousands.

Surely the serious companies among them must realise it’s a questionable marketing strategy that repels as many customers as it attracts. At the gutter end of the scale, don’t these people occasionally reflect on the point of it all? I would urge both to go to their computer and press the delete-all button.

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