I came across this thread on the SoapDish Forum today. It should be required reading for all new soapmakers and business people.
We have aggressive SPAM filters at work but still Bramble Berry gets thirty to ninety emails a day that want to buy our product (without knowing what our product is), give us money (normally from a deposed dictator that obtained said-money fraudulently), or just want us to invest in some new company (which will be hitting it big “any day now!”). It’s irritating from a normal “Ugh, and I waste my time on this?!” standpoint, baffles me from a “And yet people believe this myth be true enough times to make it worth the scammer’s while” perspective and infuriates me from a “And I pay someone to sift through these emails?!” view.
Supposedly filtering SPAM costs $874 per employee per year. I’m not surprised. So, that means that I spend $21,850 (give or take a few hundred dollars) per year because some industrious spammer bought a program to send out Viagra emails to 30,000 people per hour and .0001% of those people end up buying the Viagra, thus making it worth said spammers money.
I love this quote from the article referenced above:
“If one of out of every 72 of your employees showed up to work and slept all day, you’d be upset about that, but you’re losing that productivity simply because you have spam coming through.”
But I digress. Head over to the ‘Dish and read the thread about one small soaper’s dilemma on whether to treat a phishing-type email as a legitimate business inquiry. It certainly gave me food for thought.
