An article published today by the BBC Spam trail uncovers junk empire gives a clue about the size of some 'marketing programmes'.
This scam is about retailing pharmaceuticals using spam. The numbers are jaw dropping:
...Every day for 14 days the spammers behind the junk mail campaign pumped out more than 100m messages.
...there were more than 2,000 variations in the content of the messages making up the ... run.
....Over the course of the weeks when the spam was being sent a new variant of message was despatched every 12 minutes.
...more than 100,000 hijacked home computers spread across 119 nations had been used to despatch the junk mail.
This is one of the reasons why, even on a small scale, people have to be alert to spam tendencies whether it is spamming emails, blog posts, trackbacks, wikis and other forms of communication infrastructure.
It also emphasises the advantage of the 'real' and human voice.
A recommendation on a citizen blogger is useful and human. A recommendation from an organisation may be informative but if you mix up the two it is spam and the penalty when found out will get ever greater as the online community gets ever more fed up with being hijacked by 'marketing programmes'.
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