Spam from spammer claims spam works

Betsy Schiffman took the bait as well, but she checked some of their facts.

It appears that Endai is a legitimate company with legitimate customers (such as CitiBank). The BusinessWeek reader wonders-- perhaps they profit a little bit from unscrupulous customers, perhaps they look the other way... but at what point can you start calling them a spammer?

Sadly, given how little it costs to send out millions of spam messages only a small percentage of messages need a response to make that message effective.

If you send out 10,000,000 emails to people and get a response rate of only .01% , you’ve still gotten 1000 people to respond to you.

However, sending that many untargeted messages breeds bad will, generates a burden on both people and the Internet infrastructure and creates headaches all around.

That said, I seriously doubt that a true “spammer” is getting a 90% response rate.

I work for Boxbe, a company that treats your email like a social network or instant messaging. Boxbe offers email by invitation, in other words, only people who have been invited can reach my email address.

Endai’s messages would only get through to a Boxbe users if they are being sent by a human being that takes a test or (because they are a marketer) pay a fee to the recipient.

If you have any questions about Boxbe, feel free to email me at randy@boxbe.com.

Cheers,
Randy Stewart
Boxbe Product Manager

It's interesting to me that one of the responses to a blog post about the efficacy of spam is... well... spam. Unsolicited commercial advertising about how to block unsolicited commercial advertising.

There's a bigger message in that irony. I shan't spell it out. But I wonder if that "service" understands what it is doing to its own reputation with a tactic like that.