The New Updated "Spamming 101" - Part I

It's been an year since last time I gave you the sneak peek into my course "Spamming 101: Tips for New Spammers". And given how things change in today's fast-paced world (the fact brought to me by this great article by Aditi), what then was cutting edge is now commonplace. So, I think it is time we need to make the course known once more for the syllabus which is truly the ahead of its time.

Here's your look into the new, updated "How to Spam: Spamming for Beginners" (yes, the changes start from the name, and no, we don't like calling potential customers "dummy").

The new course will be split into two parts: the non-earning part, and the monetizing part.

Non-earning or social part:

The slew of social sites and suchlike have opened up new ways for the learning spammers to hone their skills. And since this is more of irritating, and not exactly "spamming" (except for some people), you can easily get away with a lot, while getting less brickbats and flames coming your way.

The coursework will consist of topics like (as usual, my comments are in brackets):

• Social Networks and Invitations:
  
  • How to make sure invitations are sent to all your contacts
  
  
  • How to make sure all your address books are used for sending out invites
  
  
  • How to optimize contact lists so as to make sure nobody is left out
  
  
  • How to avoid the temptation to add anything personal to the invites (mass-invites are always more efficient)
  
  
  • How to add all the Facebook applications you come across, so as to multiply the amount the mail
  
  
  • And for extra credit: Sending invites to people who will be least interested in the app you are promoting


• Social Networks and Requests: With social networking, you are in an enviable position to keep your contact list always growing, thereby giving you new people (and mailboxes) to experiment with.
  
  • How to give personal touch to the requests with creative new words (who said the orthodox word "friendship" sounds better than the new-age avataar "fraanship"?)
  
  
  • Experimenting with grammar (these two points come in handy in next part of the course, too)
  
  
  • How to use smsese and other forms of not easily understood words (today's kids should excel in this)
  
  
  • For extra credit: Only for girls, sending "frndship" requests (told you we are ahead of our times)


• Forwards: These have been around for ages, and yet, the importance of forwards in spamming can never be underestimated.
  
  • How to send all the forwards you get to everybody you know, however remotely.
  
  
  • How to write effective "If you don't send this to X people in Y minutes" appendices, and add them to all forwards which don't have anything at the end (that's a waste of a forward if you ask me)
  
  
  • The optimum number of daily forwards you should send so as to irritate people an optimum amount
  
  
  • The main point: Never ever, at any point of time, for any mail, put the e-mail addresses in anything but "to:" field. In fact, remove "cc:" and "bcc:" fields from your mail application. Remember, the more the "visible" number of people you send the mail to, the more people will think of you as a famous person.

But remember, since this is done mostly to the people you know (or people in your address book), this can go either way. So you should carefully monitor the amount of "social" spam you generate. On one hand, if you irritate the people a lot, they know where you can be found. But on the other hand, your "friends" may be able to forgive you a lot more worthless e-mails than the people you don't know.

So, the main part of this course will deal with the determining frequency and amount of spam you should start with. Research positions are available for this topic.

The course will also cover other media, like scraps, blogging (and comments on blogs) and so on.The successful candidates who finish this part will graduate to the "Hardcore Spam" part of the course. For details of that part, stick around till next post.

- The Great Eagle Has Spoken

Quote of The Day:

We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.
- Robert Wilensky, speech at a 1996 conference