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November 12, 2003
Psychology of Spam
I'm pretty sure I've talked about the economics of spam (it costs next to nothing so just one sucker's response will turn a profit). What I really don't get is the psychology behind it. I've signed up for Earthlink's SPAMBlocker, which to me at least, is a pretty clear message that I'm not interested in receiving any SPAM whatsoever. Yet some spammers will go to the trouble of filling out the auto-response form that gets them one step closer to mailbox, even though it still doesn't get them in.
I'd always thought that spam prayed on the innocence of newer internet users. "Sophisticated" netizens like myself who've been e-mailing since the early '90's don't fall for any of this, do they? Apparently so. Despite the fact that I've sent a clear signal to spammers that I'm not interested in their offers, they go the extra distance to either manually fill out a response form to my SPAMblocker or they wrote a program to do it for them. Either way it's a lot of effort for mail I'm not going to read much less respond to anyway.
Posted by Chris at November 12, 2003 03:16 PM
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