Everybody hates spam E-mail, right? Everybody with a snail mail postbox also receives a large amount of unsolicited paper advertising, or snail spam*, as it were.
I’ve made an informal estimate of my snail spam to snail mail ratio, and compared it to my electronic spam to E-mail ratio.+
Every month, I expect to receive approximately 10 snail mail items. These include bank statements, car finance statements, letters from my insurers, etc. Every week, I receive approximately 13 brochures for everything from local supermarkets to faith healers and religious zealots. This makes for 52 snail spams a month, yielding a spam ratio of about 84%.
Since my anti-spam software was installed at 16:32 on 5 December 2003, I have received 15 681 useful E-mails and 39 170 spams. This yields a spam ratio of 71.74%.
No matter how you slice the pig’s buttock, it is clear that I receive a greater proportion paper spam than electronic spam. Why, then, do I seethe quietly when a single junk E-mail makes it through the filter while casually tossing aside the myriad glossy brochures that profane my post box?
I have a two theories:
- Nobody drops Viagra ads into my post box. Nobody tells me of bargain stocks or gorgeous girls that are waiting for my call by means of the printed word. Some people I know have received invitations to join get-rich-quick schemes on paper, and even Nigerian 419 scam letters. In these last two cases, the recipients have expressed outrage. I therefore think that the qualitative nature of the advertising material has something to do with it. Perhaps people would not be offended if they received E-mail spam from Game (which rhymes eerily with “name and shame”).
- For snail spam to reach me, all that has to happen is for a lowly casual employee to walk past my house. For E-mail spam to reach me, someone has to have explicitly added my E-mail address to a mailing list. This creates an illusionary feeling that the sender actually knows or cares about me, and there is an accompanying feeling of intrusion.
We can test these hypotheses quite easily, by dropping Viagra ads in peoples’ post boxes, or by creating a Web 2.0 spamming engine for local businesses. I believe that the second idea could be wildly profitable, although the first would be a lot more fun.
*: Snail spam is completely unrelated to Hormel Food LLC, manufacturers of the fine meat product, Spam(TM), or “sweet pork magic.”
+: All this talk of Sweet Pork Magic has resulted in me misspelling “ratio” as “ration” twice.
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