[thelist] The Spam Argument [long] (was: Hiveware email addressencoder)

[Jay Blanchard]

[snip]
I'm sure she wouldn't mind my business associates showing up at her
doorstep one late night to recoup the financial losses spam has
personally cost me as a service provider.
[/snip]

I would be curious what kind of stats can be stated by those who perform
"mass e-mailings". For every million e-mails sent out what is the
positive/negative/non response rate. As a business person she surely
tracks this. I have been unable to find stats on sales related to spam.
What is the success/failure rate?

She, interestingly enough, lumps herself in with television advertsers
and bulk snail-mailers who pay tons of money to accomplish their ad
campaigns. The cost of reaching a million people via TV, reaching a
million with bulk mail, and reaching a million with e-mail are
significantly different, are they not? What is the cost per sale of
product unit to the ad dollar spent? As a business person surely she
tracks this.

I do not doubt that there is some value to the mass e-mail propagator as
well as the person who chooses to purchase her product, what I do doubt
are significant success rates for those who send out blanket (vs.
targeted) "announcements". I'd be curious to know what the stats are. 

Jay

"It's hip to snip!"

<tip type="MySQL/PHP Error Reporting">
If you would like a more specific message from a wonky SQL query in PHP
use the following example to set up verbose error reporting;

$query = "SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE foo > 12 ";
if(!($data = mysql_query($query, $database_connection))){
    print("MySQL Reports :" . mysql_error() . "\n");
    exit();
}

mysql_error() gives more information about errors occuring during the
query. Also this rolls error checking and performance of the query all
into one function. You can now retrieve the data as you normally would.
</tip>