From: Shachar Shemesh (linux-il_at_nonexisting.hamakor.org.il)
Date: Wed 21 Jan 2004 - 13:53:25 IST
Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
>Shachar Shemesh wrote:
>
>
>
>>Then again, maybe not. For example - I'm confounded if I can understand
>>why spammers will vigorously spam people who ask to be removed.
>>Presumably, if someone asks to be removed, he is highly unlikely to ever
>>buy something from you. Spamming him again will only cost you the
>>(insignificant, but still) money, with almost no hope of seeing any
>>back. I'm not sure what this means about the above logic.
>>
>>
>
>If you ignorethem, your email address is "unconfirmed". If you reply to
>remove yourself from the list, you are confirming your email address
>exists and gets to a real person, which makes it much more valuable.
>
>Geoff.
>
>
How is that more valuable? The precise calculation should be something
like this:
a - The chances that an unconfirmed email reaches a real person.
b - The chances that a random real person will actually buy stuff.
c - The chances that someone who asked to be removed will buy stuff.
In general, for it to be profitable to not honor removal requests, c
must be greater than a*b. I suggest that this is not the case.
a is somewhere in the 80%.
b is somewhere in the 0.5% (according to my rather dim recollection of
spam news. I'm not really sure about this one).
Are you truely suggesting that someone who sent an email saying "don't
ever ever spam me again" is more than 0.4% likely to buy something
advertised in a future email (meaning - buying a product for every 250
spams received)?
Shachar
P.S.
If anyone has better numbers, please let us know.
-- Shachar Shemesh Lingnu Open Systems Consulting http://www.lingnu.com/ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to linux-il-request_at_linux.org.il with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail linux-il-request_at_linux.org.il
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