Internet Marketing

[zscoundrel]

> Ah, but now we can help them to feel our pain.  They have included two
> viable email addresses in this list.  We could give them a taste of 
> their own medicine.
> 
> We could use procmail in a script to forward 100 copies of some large 
> text file with a title like, 'request for xxx industry email addresses'. 
>   By changing each title, they would have to look at each one before 
> deleting the computer generated spam.

They'd wise up pretty quickly.

I already sent them a reply, cut-n-pasted from a website
about alternative ways to cure cancer. Entirely irrelevant,
as was their post to me, but with some interesting
information that might make 'em read the e-mail through.

See I figure it this way. If you fight this kind of fire with
more of the same fire, you accomplish one half the task. You
may feel a little better, but the spammer isn't going to be
stopped by receiving a bunch of spam. People that are thinking
on that level are pretty immune to the delicacies of rational
thought.

No, you gotta get inside their head a little more, and think
like a spammer. Dumb down a bit, think like someone who's trying
to get something for nothing. In his own world, he is driven by
what we obviously see as greed, and he actually thinks he's doing
a Good and Useful thing with his spams. Thus if you send him a
bunch of spam, he'll shrug it off as a feeble attempt to do
something he's much better at.

If you're going to use brute force tactics to stop someone with
a spammer mentality, you can't try to squeeze through the tiny
hole of e-mail. Better to utilize such a small orifice with
a more elegant approach, which maximizes the brief window you
have.

Brute force is effective when you're above. When you're coming
from beneath, be wise as a serpent, gentle as a dove.

Pardon the poem.

What you may want to do is _invite_ him into an entirely different
endeavor altogether. It's not easy; you alone cannot do it,
but if a few people do this, it begins to have a cumulative
effect.

The art of distracting your enemy.

Here is what I do. In the brief moment of time which I allocate
to fighting spam, I notice that he's got a return-mail address.
Obviously a newbie to the spam business. Thus, he might still be
redirectible. I quickly cut-n-paste from a website that I recently
bookmarked because I felt it was high in signal-to-noise, and
send it to him. Maybe he'll get it, maybe he won't. But rather
than feeling like I just forked the front yard of the guy who
egged my house, provoking a full-on TP of the neighborhood,
I feel like I at least did the right thing on my end.

I hope you follow this reasoning. It ain't for everyone, and its
flaws are pretty obvious. Helps me sleep at night, fighting fire
with water...

-Jared