begin Thursday 27 May 2004 14:11, ernst(_at_)baschny(_dot_)de quote:
It's cheaper to send 1.000.000 emails out to "anyone" and expect that 1%
click on the link than to carefully find and select 10.000 interested
persons where probably 10% will click on the link. This selection is too
expensive and not needed yet (since the burden to send 1.000.000 emails is
so low).
However, what they're confronted with is a situation where 0.1% of
their audience is annoyed so much about spam that we're ready to
spend significant amounts of time to fight spam (by developping tools
and protocols to stop them).
If the spammers would have been smart, they would have *negatively*
selected us, so that much less of us would get spam.
So the question is not to prune down their list to these 10% of users
who might be dumb enough to click on the spamvertized links, but
rather to remove those 0.1% who are motivated enough to file
complaints, develop tools, etc.
Less spam for highly motivated antispammers => less spam-blocking
tools in existence => more spam for the unwashed masses.
Alain