Don’t let them take your business away...

I’ve been getting more spam lately.

Not the kind we have all come to expect – the large-scale offshore crap our spam filters catch – but the kind that smells of desperate marketers acting on bad advice.

This kind of spam often comes direct from the marketer email account rather than a service. Often they mail a poorly written letter to past contacts or people they find online in forums or on social networks as if they were long lost buddies. Often they do it making the most amateur mistake of all: adding all their contacts to the TO: field.

In a blog post last week, Glenn Burks noted that with a bit of sarcasm: "In this day and age with all the trojans and viruses out there just to do a blanket broadcast to everyone in your address book, real smart and really professional looking."

Another variation of this is the marketer who joins a new social network only to have the network send invitations to everyone on their list – even if they are not legitimate contacts. In one example I received repeated invitations from a user going by ‘blindguy55’ to join various social networks. After a bit of research I discover that the reason I’m on this guys email list is because he was terminated from a Leaders Club service for sending tens of thousands of unsolicited emails – against our usage terms.

Why in the year 2009, would anyone still be resorting to sending spam?

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