[ih] "Father of e-Marketing"

[Dave Crocker]

On 6/1/2019 3:58 PM, Vint Cerf wrote:
> i think the spam wasn't quite e-marketing as much as it was just abuse 
> of a mailinglist....


1. Abuse of mail, certainly -- and especially for the rules and mores in 
force at the time -- but it was a hand-generated addressee list into the 
message, not part of a list processor redistribution mechanism.

2. He didn't know how to use bcc and put all the addresses into the To 
field, which broke the (sndmsg?) handler so that when the maximum number 
of addresses filled the To: field, the rest were stuffed into the 
beginning of the body of the message, one address per line.  And there 
were a lot of addresses.  The actual content was quite short -- many, 
many lines fewer than the address overflow in the body.

3. I recently heard that in spite of the community outrage, the campaign 
was actually successful.  It generated a goodly number of purchases for 
what it was promoting.

By this measure, it will might qualify as e-marketing.  alas...

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net