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Niche spam

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Most spam is relatively general, blasting out a general-interest offer to the widest possible net. Sometimes I’ll see spam that’s targeted much smaller segment of the population, like small business owners. Today I got the most narrowly focused spam I’ve ever seen — talk radio repping services for book authors.

From Marsha Friedman, president of Event Management Services of Clearwater, Florida (event-management.com, but no link) comes this niche spam. How many people are possibly in the market for this? This seems like a really inefficient marketing method — a case where the damaged reputation that comes from spamming must outweigh the number of clients they’ll pull in.

Phil Ringnalda
February 13, 2006 5:15 PM

From what I hear, vanity publishing is *huge* these days. Maybe that's the target market: people with no connections to publishing, who are willing to spend money to be authors.

Jahan
May 18, 2006 10:43 AM

Marsha Friedman of EMSI has spammed multiple e-mail accounts of mine for years. I actually wrote and called a couple of years ago, and she indignantly defended her spamming by saying that "some people" appreciated her giving them notice of her services. I'm sure that's true. One out of 10,000,000 perhaps, and the other 9,999,999 resent the intrusion. Terrible marketing strategy, and I hope her business suffers for it.

Brian
January 21, 2007 9:22 AM

I was on the receiving end of Marsha Friedman's spam for over a year. It was obviously sent to email addresses harvested from my websites so I would get about 10 copies in each new spam mailing. The most amazing thing is that I reported it as spam dozens of times to Mailwasher and for some reason it took well over a year before they finally added it to their database. More oddly, no matter how I set up the blacklist filter on Mailwasher, it would not block her spam!

This discussion has been closed.

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