Spam Gets Literary Notice

As a public service for all you Spam-a-holics, I am calling your attention here to a terrific article in The New Yorker about Spam. And, I'm not talking about the food.

True to the style and quality of that publication, the article is smart, well-written and beautifully documented. If you want to know the whole story about Spam, I recommend it highly. You can read it here:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/06/070806fa_fact_specter

If you're not that interested, permit me to quote a few facts from the article - which may surprise you.

* Spammers send 1 million e-mail messages to get 15 positive responses.

* Hotmail processes 4 billion pieces of e-mail every day, and delivers just 600 million. The rest are filtered out as Spam.

* Microsoft maintains 130,000 special Hotmail accounts specifically for the purpose of trapping and examining suspicious e-mail.

These numbers are staggering by any standard. This article makes the case better than I could ever hope to, as to why e-mail marketing has now become an area of technology that is best managed by people who really know what they are doing.