Bulk email marketing is the more benign term that is used to describe the process of sending bulk emails to unsuspecting citizens for the purpose of affecting a sale online. The more accurate of widespread terms that are used for this procedure is spam. Spam basically requires two things to get going: mail addresses to send bulk emails to and a gullible server to send the mails themselves. As one can imagine, many people aren’t too happy to receive over a hundred mails in their inbox telling them to buy Viagra and therefore, there has been enough public fury over spam that spam filters have become more and more intelligent to the point where you may never see spam come into your inbox. But the question remains that if this was such a bother to the very market that people were trying to target why did the online marketers persist?

The answer to this lies in the relative simplicity of using the medium of the internet to spread the word about the product. If we take a parallel to spam in the offline world, TV advertising comes pretty close. Most of the ads that we get to see are also unsolicited but are such a regular feature of the viewing experience that it has become acceptable to watch 5 minutes of advertising material out of twenty minutes of actual programming content. Bulk email marketing, some would argue, is basically the same thing. However, the difference lies in the fact that TV does not affect your professional life. There have been lawsuits filed on ISPs that have not taken action against spammers to the tune of millions of dollars citing lost productivity. This money could not be recovered from those who actually sent bulk emails because a spammer almost never reveals his or her true identity and lives a shadowy existence on the net.

So what drives these people to just keep sending bulk emails to all and sundry? Spam at the end of the day, is one of the most cost-effective modes of advertising. Spam doesn’t cost the sender a red cent to send a mail because most of the mailing is done by opening a back door onto some email server and sending the word out to all of the server’s users. This coupled with the reach of the internet and the fact there are no advertising rules on the internet mean that most companies would rather try out this route and consider any resulting sales a bonus to the kitty.

Bulk email marketing is not a permanent state of affairs. If studies and numbers are to be believed then the number of spammers sending bulk emails is actually reducing and we may be seeing the end of the spammers who send bulk emails.