Comment by elliekelly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by elliekelly | Hacker News Reader

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My little sister works in customer support for a fairly large email marketing company that competes with MailChimp. From hearing her talk about some of her conversations with users booted from the platform I think a good number of spammers sincerely believe they have a legitimate business and are confused to hear they've been flagged for spam. A lot of these people seem to only know enough about the internet to be dangerous. Preaching about passive income has gone main-stream in the last few years and many spammers are just ordinary people who have been conned into buying email lists from some "internet guru" to run a "click funnel business."

It's kind of like prison. Everyone says they're innocent. Some guilty people might even sincerely believe they're innocent. But when everyone is saying they didn't do anything wrong it's really hard for the person who actually didn't do anything wrong to get "justice."

Unrelated, I would love it if a publication profiled a few spammers. I suspect they're very different from how most people imagine them.

Great point. I had a non-tech-savvy friend who “accidentally” got into spamming, and had no idea what he was doing was wrong or antisocial. He simply got hooked with one of those “make $$$ from home easy!!” scams where they send you a pre-baked spamming kit and convince you that you’re a businessman with an incredible opportunity. He came to me for help when he started getting banned everywhere and his emails stopped going through. I told him he was scammed and that the “kit” he paid for was junk mailer scheme, but he swore up and down that no, he’s an entrepreneur and that all the problems must be his competitors “hacking him.”

I felt bad for him that he had no idea what it was that he was doing but I couldn’t convince him that it was not legit. It was MLM-level brainwashing.

The best part is, when this guy votes, it counts as much as your vote and mine.

Absolutely agree.

Many spammers don't see how what they are doing is wrong. They run a LinkedIn scraper to collect 100,000 business emails for people in their industry and they want to email them.

When you explain that they're spamming, they get offended. "No, this is not spam! These people are going to be interested in this product."

They just don't understand why it's wrong.

Spam is That Which We Don't Do

https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/that-which-we-dont.html

I cannot imagine the customer support burden in time and emotional energy that goes into explaining to people, day in and day out, that the thing they hung their hopes on is spamming and not permitted. It sounds exhausting and draining.

Having done community moderation in a past life, I know how tiring it is to try to offer real engagement and empathy for people who refuse to understand that they've acted in an unacceptable way. There are also the people who know they're abusive and expect to just talk they way through it until you allow them to continue. Combined, it's enough to convince someone to stop offering humanity and sympathy to those who have acted badly, knowingly or otherwise.

> I would love it if a publication profiled a few spammers. I suspect they're very different from how most people imagine them.

You might like Spam Nation: https://amzn.com/dp/B00L5QGBL0/

Awesome, thanks for the recommendation! I just ordered a copy for me and another for my sister as a Christmas gift.

Excellent book in a journalistic style. Good present. You will (both) have your own views on Krebs' strategies to make complex issues accessible to 'civilians'.

I've worked on the email dev team of a mailchimp competitor and from what I've overheard, when a customer gets spam-flagged the first step is to help him avoid it in the future. A lot of small businesses using these tools might actually accidentally misuse them.

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