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October 4, 2005
Spam Queen renounces her throne
OK, I'll bite. Self-proclaimed spam queen Laura Betterly put out a press release today.
The oft-quoted Betterly, who recently boasted of making millions of dollars from spamming, now claims that she and her new Florida company, In Touch Media Group Inc., have sworn off email marketing. 
"Bulk commercial e-mail has gotten to the point where it isn’t effective. We just don’t do it anymore. What’s the point? It doesn’t get a response, and we found people are overloaded with advertising messages and no longer willing to receive more, especially in their inbox, unless they specifically asked for it,” she says in the PR. (She goes into the subject in great detail on her blog.)
These days, Betterly is focusing instead on "a combination of market research, design, search engine marketing, ... search engine publicity and sites like the recently launched www.pixelbay.org that drive traffic directly to her clients sites."
Be that as it may, Betterly is still listed on the Spamhaus register of the world's biggest spammers, as well as on the SPEWS spam blacklist.
Maybe this PR is an attempt to get the spam blacklists to reconsider. Or maybe Betterly and her chairman Robert Cefail are trying to pump some life into their company's stock.
Posted by brian at October 4, 2005 7:46 PM
Comments
Let's not forget http://www.onebuckpixels.com
Posted by: Jason at October 6, 2005 5:38 PM
Where is the line between sending bulk commercial e-mail and spamming. The article says she "started a business" with $15,000. It doesn't say she got fined, sued, arrested, whatever. So is what she did actually technically illegal or not?
Posted by: linux cds at November 19, 2005 9:02 PM
You can comply fully with CAN-SPAM and still be a spammer. Legitimate bulk emailers only send to recipients who have previously verified that they want to be on the bulker's mailing lists (a concept known as confirmed opt-in). CAN-SPAM, on the other hand, is based on the concept of opt-out, which forces people to unsubscribe. For more info on this distinction, see http://www.spamhaus.org/mailinglists.html .
Posted by: Brian at November 22, 2005 3:10 PM
