On Mon, 17 Mar 2003 09:11:02 -0500, Sam Ewalt wrote: > On Sun, 16 Mar 2003 17:04:52 -0500, Samuel W. Heywood wrote:
<snip> > And I think your assumptions about pornography are also mistaken. > I hardly ever get spam promoting porn sites. Mostly it's just > Nigerian generals and drug offers. I used to get the free cable > tv device offer all the time, but that seems to have disappeared. > Once you get on a certain kind of spam list as being possibly > interested in certain kinds of offers then you will get lots of > mail that's very much the same kind of thing. It's somewhat > targeted that way. The spammers want their victims to believe that they had signed up for some "opt-in" mailing lists and that they had expressed an interest in receiving periodic announcements about the kinds of products and services and web sites being promoted by the spammers. The victims of course know that they have never expressed any interest in such stuff. I don't know why you are so lucky as to not be receiving any porn spams. Most people do receive such kinds of spams. I even know some very tight-laced and puritanical church ladies whose inboxes are constantly being flooded with porn spams. Even little children who can't possibly be interested in sex, and who are not allowed to visit any web sites having any unsuitable content for children, even they are receiving lots of porn spams. Unlike the professional bulk snail-mail advertisers, the spammers do not use any kind of criteria for targetting you. The professional bulk snail-mail advertisers do have good reasons for targetting you. Most of them have already found out from some pretty good sources some information on the kinds of products and services you are interested in. Also many of them have found out from somewhere some information about your income bracket and your politics and your religious beliefs. Some segments of even the telemarketing industry are good at developing information and carefully selecting the people they call. Spammers just harvest email addresses at random. Bulk snail-mail advertisers are very selective about whom to include on their mailing lists. Also it appears that they share their mailing lists among their colleagues in the bulk snail-mail advertising profession and they make agreements among themselves about who is going to send which advertisements to whom. That is why you seldom get identical snail-mail advertisements and propagandas, each one coming from a different snail-mailer. A snail mailer will hardly ever send you a progaganda identical to another one which he knows will be sent to you by some other snail-mailer. They have better things to do than to waste their time and postage money on duplication of efforts and resourses. Snail-mailers have their act together and they are well organized. They are proud of the advertising work they do and they never try to disguise the address of the sender except in a very few cases where the propaganda is being sent just as a political dirty trick. In the case of spams you will often receive hundreds of copies of the same spam message, each one coming from a different spammer. Of course the spammers don't care because they don't even pay the "postage". It is you who pays for all the spam you get. Sam Heywood -- This mail was written by user of The Arachne Browser: http://browser.arachne.cz/
