This is a subject close to my heart. A loophole in the Australian Spam Act allows spamming if the sender has “inferred consent” which can be anything from giving your business card out at a network function to having an email address on your website.

When I wrote about this on Smartcompany last year I was criticised by one reader and yesterday I started receiving emails from an office fit out company.  This goes to show some marketers and business owners don’t get it.

People are swamped with email, they don’t want more unless it provides value. It’s highly unlikely an email they didn’t ask for will have any value at all.

So don’t spam your client base. They don’t like it and it will hurt your business.

Out of nearly 350 million messages sent 28 people attempted to buy something which the researchers estimate would have returned about $US 100 a day.

Not bad money, but hardly worth the effort of setting up a fake site, arranging the merchant facilities and getting on to the Storm botnet. 

The return also assumes all the potential purchases were genuine. There’s a good chance many of them would have been fraudulent which would have further eroded the returns.

If those returns are typical, then we’re probably seeing the end of the mass spam, although I’m worried that a new breed of 419 type scammers might take advantage of people in financial straits as the economy worsens.

The full study is available at the UCSD website.