You've got Spam!

Spam, I am sure you have heard of it. It comes in two varieties, the delicious (cough cough) packaged meat variety SPAM (which has one of the most amusing websites I have ever seen), and the annoying monotonous slag heap of crap e-mail, spam. I will mostly be covering the latter.

So how about some interesting statistics? Did you know that around 85% of e-mail traffic is spam mail, a number roughly around 90 billion spam messages sent around the world every day. yes that is 3,750,000,000 an hour, 62,500,000 a minute 1,041,666.6 (repeating) a second. If this was physical mail it would form a stack of letters that would reach to the moon and back, then (with length to spare) wrap around the earth about 5 or six times.

The concern with spam is not just that it takes up space, but it can be dangerous. Many contain links to malicious sites, or clicking them will confirm your existence and result in a greater slew of unwanted mail. I made this mistake on one of my older addresses (it was AOL so they didn't offer much protection) and it resulted in my receiving roughly 100 - 200 dangerous viral spam e-mails a day, essentially shutting down the account.

Needless to say, with all of this crap e-mail flying about it is just about impossible to actually send an e-mail advertisement of any kind without it being marked spam and ignored. We have passed the age when people are actually interested in random mail offers, and are no longer tricked by catchy subject lines. As such the entire approach to e-mail advertising must be rethought.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (iab) has been considerate enough to post together a nice list of sensible practices for e-mail (most of which seems like common sense to me). However, I am afraid it is probably too little to late. People have already been conditioned to ignore ALL advertisements, even the news letters they explicitly sign up for. Basically the method has lost any ability to build a market, and now appeals only to those already deeply interested in your product and old people who don't know what they are doing. It will probably be decades before e-mail advertising could ever be truly viable again.