The history of spam is actually quite interesting. In the late 1800’s sales people would ‘spam’ telegraph lines and
send messages to wealthy land owners about investing opportunities. In the late 1970’s the military’s web (which preceded today’s internet) was used to send out an offer to 400 people with a poor response.
It was so hated that no one tried this tactic again for years. In the 1980s a Monty Python skit in which people sang the theme song to the popular meat SPAM over conversation gave birth to the term as we know it. With the invention of the World Wide Web, spam has taken off due to its effectiveness at compelling the general public whose previous experience with spam had only been that of a mid-dinner telemarketing call. The web offers global connectivity and around the clock marketing. Repeated spamming occurs because it is estimated that it will take on average five to ten emails before an end user will finally become curious and open the email to see what it has inside.
Marketing is a numbers game and spamming is a way to reach a mass amount of people. Stat and marketing gurus know that about 70- 75% of all email sent is spam and that there are around 1.9 billion email users world-wide. This means almost 1.2 billion people are affected by spammers. Let’s say that if only 2% of the spam sent out converts to sales, then a lot of marketers can get rich. It is a numbers game that marketers are playing around the world; the emails do not need great content, they just need to reach the right person at the right time in order to work.
Email spam is an issue everyone with an email account faces. The harsh truth is that spam email is not going away and with more technology available to spammers it will most likely continue to increase. Many people ask how to avoid spam emails, but it is almost impossible to avoid all spam. The best thing you can do is set your email filters and hope for the best. You will however notice that these filters do not catch all spam and could inadvertently label an email spam that is not spam. There are many tactics that spammers also use to get around these filters. If you think you do not get much spam go to the ‘spam’ folder of your email (which is often hidden) and look at the number in parentheses. Mine says 79 right now; that’s 79 messages from spammers I didn’t even know about.
Quite often people think they can simply ‘unsubscribe’ to the email subscription and they are all set. In fact, this is often a bad thing to do because it assures the source that your email address is valid and in use. This may stop that one source from emailing you but it will open up a plethora of other potential sources to try and solicit your inbox.
The best thing to do when you get a spam email is to mark it as junk and delete it. I know this can be time consuming but it often the most effective solution. For those of us who are fluent at it, we become masters of skimming our email to open only important ones and then click the almighty ‘unread’ tab followed by ‘trash’ or ‘delete’. This can cause a few problems including the removal and loss of important messages. Yes, the process can be undone in case of emergency, but it may be too late by the time you find out that you received an email which was time sensitive, and you overlooked it.
Author: Bryan Conte is a professional copywriter and Co-Founder of Webdigia, an SEO company that specializes in providing internet marketing solutions for individuals and businesses alike.
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