Welcome to Credit Withdrawal, if you like what you see, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

We all get it, probably by the tens or hundreds per day. Spam Mail.

Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages. While the most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging spam, Usenet newsgroup spam, Web search engine spam, spam in blogs, wiki spam, mobile phone messaging spam, Internet forum spam and junk fax transmissions.

Spam reaches everyone and now anti-spam organization Spamhaus has claimed spam is on target to hit an alarming level of 95% of all email on the Internet. That means of all the billions and billions of e-mail, only a small percentage are of legitimate use. 95% are from shady, no-name, no-history groups out to make a quick buck. It should be obvious that you shouldn’t buy something from someone you’d never heard of before, but spam is successful because no matter how many people delete it some respond and spend money. The spamming business model costs billions a year in maintenance and administration fees for businesses fighting spam. Those costs are passed on to the consumer. The reason spammers do this, even though the response rate is a fraction of a percentage of all the e-mails sent, because it still makes money for the spammers and there’s no way for businesses and governments to stop it.

Why SPAM is bad for you.

Spam is bad for consumers because of the anonymity of the seller. They can sell shoddy or even worthless goods to people all over the world, and if those recipients complain, they have little or no recourse for getting either their money back or a replacement item. Too many of these criminals put up a ‘temporary’ storefront somewhere, get a flurry of business, send out cheap or no goods, then up anchor and move to another venture. The people taken are out the money and out of options.

Spam costs legitimate businesses millions of dollars a year via lost sales, maintenance of their internal e-mail networks to eliminate spam, and loss of branding for those spam messages that ’spoof’ brand names to increase the ‘legitimacy’ of their offers. The last of these is the most long-term and the most dangerous.

Companies spend millions to get and maintain brand recognition. “Just Do It” and “Where’s the Beef?” are a couple of brand slogans that have made their respective companies leaders in their fields. When spammers hijack these slogans, brands, and names to make their e-mails seem more ‘real’ they detract from the reputation of the legitimate companies.

A bad experience with someone selling ‘Nikes’ at a HUGE discount from some overseas ‘distributor’ leaves the buyer with a small ‘bad-taste’ attached to Nike, even though the Nike company had nothing to do with it. When the buyer remembers being sold bad goods, and the Nike name is attached to it, fairly or not, their attitude toward Nike in the future will be negatively influenced.

You can stop it!

The way to stop spam is to make it unprofitable for the sender to send. Pure and simple. Make sending spam ineffective, and they’ll stop sending it. Ignore ALL spam messages, and NEVER NEVER NEVER respond to any unsolicited mail for products. If you just have to have what’s advertised, take a little extra time and get it from a legitimate business (probably at a little higher price. Remember, if it sounds too good to be true it is!!).

It may seemingly be a good deal, but overall spam is hurting everyone. Do your part to stop it!

Technorati : personal finance, spam, spam mail

We hope you liked the article, Subscribe to the Feed and get our articles every day!