You'e Got SPAM! What to do when they come for you.

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Everyday it seems that there are more and more junk mails coming into our inboxes. It is a mix between the stupid:

"Dearest Love, I need to give you $25,000,000 cash."

The silly:

"Bill Gates wants to give you his first born."

And the flat out weird:

"Shipments of bananas contain flesh eating bacteria!"

So, why do we receive them, and what can you do about it? First, foremost and above all: Stop forwarding these e-mails to your friends, neighbors, co-workers, and especially, me! You did not win the lottery you never entered, and Coke is not going to send you a case of soda a day for the rest of your life. It is just not going to happen.

The reason that you receive these "hook" e-mails is so that you will forward on the mail to everyone you know and then those e-mails (notice you sent them CC, not BCC) eventually wind up in the inbox of the spammer who sent the original e-mail. So the game is to get you to send more e-mail so that the spammers will send out more e-mail. And then the cycle starts all over again.

Spammers send out this sort of mail because it is cheap. If a person were to send out a letter with a 1^st class stamp to 10,000 people, at a cost of $.50 per letter (Postage, envelope, paper, printing) this would cost at least $5000. If they were selling a product for $50, they would need 1000 people to respond, just to break even. (And this means 10% actually buy!) A spammer can send out (literally) 100,000 e-mails and the cost is roughly $60. If the product they are selling is $50, they need 2 sales to make money, and this means only a .002% response. 2 out of 100,000. And people keep buying things, so the spammers keep sending things.

And the worst part is that they do not even have to sell you anything to make money! If you go to a site listed in a spam mail, even to "opt out" of the e-mail list, you are making money for the spammer by visiting a page that has sponsored banners on it. This means that hard working business owners like you are paying for their banners to be displayed on websites, only the sites they are on are actually nothing more then spam banks. Don't believe it? Look at Google AdSense. The headline on the site reads: "Earn money from relevant ads on your website."

If you are unsure that an e-mail from someone you don’t know is real (.001% is it), or it is sent to you from a friend, but seems too good to be true (it is), there are some sites to look at that will help you demystify the spam and take back your inbox.

HOAXBUSTERS

Urban Legends Reference Pages

Truth or Fiction...Your Email Reality Check

And my favorite site to read about just how far people will go to take themselves out of the gene pool:
The Darwin Awards

So, the next time you are offered a gazillion dollars for transferring money from a small African nation that was owed to your long lost dead relative who just happened to own a publically traded oil company...think about it. Then delete it. Your friends and family will thank you, and you will be doing a great service to your company, your state and your nation. America, and I, will thank you.

Don Raleigh is the President of Evolve Systems in Roseville, Minnesota. He has assisted in the launch of over 500 websites and has spoken across the country on topics such as Internet Security, X500 directories, Programming Tools and Content Management Systems.

President, Evolve Systems
651-628-4000