How Powerful is the Turn-Off Power of Spam?

JayBonci asks: "Here's a question to the Slashdot readerbase. How powerful is the turnoff power of spam? With an upcoming political election in the United States, and a nation not very-well defended against mass unsolicited emailings, what kind of anti-marketing medium is spam? Could a spammer push out millions of: 'V0te for G3orge W. Bush!' or 'J0hn Kerry for Presidnet@', in the hopes to turn off (or on) voters. Spam marketing penetration is terrible (I've heard figures like .001%), but how powerful is its anti-marketing capabilities? An interesting discussion for the Slashdot audience." How often do you make the decision to NOT buy something form a company because you know they engage in spamming activities?

California Spam King Bill Jones running for Senate

[dananderson]

Spam King Bill Jones [billjonessucks.com] is running for U.S. Senate from California. He doesn't have a chance, but to make sure his spam activities receive broad daylight, please link to my website http://billjonessucks.com/ [billjonessucks.com] until this November 2nd. Thanks. We now return you to your regular programming. . .

Spam has turned off our email

[ONOIML8]

I can tell you that nobody at my place of work will ever bet troubled by election spam. Or any other for that matter.

As of last week our core group no longer uses email. We agreed, as a group, that email is not productive as compared to a combination of paper memos, phone calls, faxes and runners. The amount of spam that we had to sift through and the money and effort to fight it wasn't worth the trouble.

Sure, we could have spent some more and tried to filter it better. But our focus is supposed to be on other things (emergency management, law enforcement, etc.) and not fighting spam.

So I guess the spammers win.

Or did they? They just lot a small part of their audience. Not that they'll notice. But I wonder how many others will give up on it like we've done.

Look at Howard Dean

[Anonymous Coward]

Howard Dean ("YEEARGH") ran a marvelously successful SPAM campaign, spamming the daylights out of people. Then was able to play the "oopsie, I didn't do it, someone I hired did it without my consent", but then he CONTINUED to spam. He was attempting to make himself out as the "candidate for geeks", and blew it all with this. We all know how he ended up.

The best part? I'm not even American and was getting his spam.