On my flight back from Europe last week, I was sitting by a man who decided that he needed to claim the armrest between us by making himself as large as possible while not moving his arm no matter what happened. There was also an odd scent of body odor permeating from our group of seats (which could have been me- I couldn’t remember if I had put deodorant on both armpits or not). This meant that I was crammed in my seat, 9 hours into flying, smelling body odor that may or may not have been my own.
To pass the time, I watched an entire season of Spaced (that is a great show) on my Blackberry and read anything and everything I could get my grubby little hands on. After finishing 9 Stories and exhausting every periodical provided by the airline, I moved to October issue of Harper’s I had in my bag. While I was perusing through the Harper’s Index, I came upon this little tidbit of information: According to Vern Paxson of the International Computer Science Center, 1 in 12,414,000 spam emails actually receives a response.
1 in 12,414,000. That is not a good clickthrough rate.
How “spam” is defined isn’t explained in the magazine (the definition depends on who you talk to and who is trying to sell you what), but ol’ Vern seems to know his stuff. He even writes papers on spam- Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion, so I will accept his numbers. If that number holds true, then my question is this:
Who is the moron who is the 1?
Here is some Spaced for you: Spaced | Return of the Jaffa
Tags: body odor, Email, morons, spam
