This article I’m writing is a translation of one I wrote on March in my Spanish blog. It was based on an experiment I made which gave me a very interesting increase in traffic and also lots of critics and good opinions about that too. I’ll translate it but I’ll leave apart some things not interesting for you at all.

Once upon a time there was a cute and handsome young blogger who had one of the best blogs ever seen. Suddenly he received by mail and by mistake a list of 2821 email addresses in an spammy email sent by a web directory:

Did you like the introduction? Don’t waste your time clicking on the picture, I’m not going to give you any of those three thousand emails . This is a reduced screen capture (3200×1200) with all the recipients of that email.

As I said before a web directory owner wanted to promote his service and he made the stupid mistake of publishing all the email addresses. The first thing I thought was - OMG! He couldn’t do it worse, stupid spammer… - but even I knew it was spam I visited the directory to check out if it was as bad as their webmaster, so in spite of all I said before I was a conversion because he got what he wanted, I mean visits, I was a success for him in traffic terms. Before carrying on with the rest of the article let’s see what is spam and whether it is legal.

What is Mail Spam ? It is the act or action of sending emails not consented and massively.

Is it legal? It depends on the country, some are stricter at this point than others. In Spain it is forbidden for commercial purposes. if you want to enter more deeply in the matter you’ll have to consult the law for Information Services of your country. To make it short if you don’t have commercial purposes it is not illegal but it is or it could be inmoral or unethical.

Having said that and seeing that I had visited the disastrous spammer’s site I began to think of the rate of success/conversions that the mail spam would get as a marketing strategy, so I said to myself - Well, I don’t have commercial purposes and I will not provide further information (emails) than the one available, Why don’t I make a little experiment?. - Then it came the internal debate whether or not to do so, it took me a while to decide… but at the end I did it. I sent another spammy email to 400 addresses in groups of about 60, about 7 emails. I didn’t write anything special, only that I was making an spammy experiment. It was very important to make it clear to the recipients that I was doing spam. Obviously there was the URL of my blog in the content.

Let’s see a graph of the results:

It is totally clear there is an increase in traffic the day I made the experiment. I almost doubled the visits. Before the experiment my blog was averaging 50 unique daily visitors, if I don’t take in count holidays, and the day I did it the blog reached 150 unique daily visitors so if I sent 400 emails and 100 of those people (150-50) came to my blog I had a 25% of success with the mail spam. Amazing! So we have in conclusion that mail spam works and it can do it in a very important percentage.

Ok, ok, don’t shoot me with a gun, I’m not a mail spammer, this was only an experiment . I’m not going to do it again. As I said before it isn’t ethical because you disturb other people with things they probably don’t want to read, and worse than that, you can make available to other spammers the email addresses of that people. Don’t stop reading because you can learn …

Ways to avoid being a victim of spam

1. Do not write your email address publicly on blogs, websites, forums, etc. This is because there are automatic crawlers looking for information like this for this evil purpose. You can write it using formats like yourname at yourdomain dot com or yourname [at] yourdomain dot com, or also instead of putting text you can put a picture showing your address.
2. Avoid taking part in email chains, ask your friends or relatives for not including you in them. These chains make available to spammers hundreds and hundreds of email addresses.
3. Don’t believe in those websites that promise they will told you who of your contacts have blocked you on MSN if you write your email address and your password. This is a total cheat, they only want al the email addresses you have in your address book.
4. Do not reply to spam mails. If you do it the spammers know your address is a valid one and they can send you more spam. Also the unsubscribe link placed on the bottom of the mail can be used with this intention so if you have never subscribed to an specific site but it sends you spam it is better to block it with a filter.

I hope this advice helps you to avoid being a victim of spam and also to avoid making your friends and family victims too.

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