the affiliate spam problem

I have found that there is not a single program out on the internet (in ANY industry) that affiliates do not spam for.

At times I have recieved spam for every single casino on the net as well as ebay, amazon, and just about every single shopping website you can name.

Since I have direct access to most of the gambling affiliate programs, when I get spam for them I try and determine the affiliate management email address and forward the spam to them with hopes they will deal with it properly.

The true test of whether any program deals with the reports proactively is whether the same affiliate continues to spam that group after an acceptable time frame to have it stopped.

After years and years and years and years of spam reports, I don't recall a single gambling affiliate program warning affiliates on a regular basis about what happens to their accounts if they do in fact get spam complaints about them. (not a single one)

It does seem as though a few programs have much less of a problem, but even those that react immediately to the complaints, continue to get new affiliates spamming for them on a regular basis. (even those that many have on top of their lists as the best)

As far as stopping them in the first place, they can not. They can have terms in place that state not to do it (all programs do) but in reality they can't. If it were truly possible, then those "higher rated" programs would never see spammers join their ranks but they all do.

I am not saying that any single program is or is not doing enough to stop the spammers, but in my opinion to infer that only some programs have a spam problem is incorrect.

For those programs that do react quickly and swiftly to our complaints, thank you.

To those that are dragging your feet because a new affiliate or larger affiliate appears to be turning in decent numbers, please pay attention as the problems on your side will get worse, and affiliates often has less and less interest in working with programs that take a less interested role on combatting this problem.

Rick
Universal4


Side note: I have always felt that the single bissgest mistake made in the internet industry is the fact that any email server software forwards or sends any single email that the send from does not match the actual sender of the email. I don't care one single bit how much lobbying the mail haouses would do against this being changed.

If every single email traversing the internet had a send from that matched the actual sender of the email, spam would end or be nearly eradicated within a few months. Why?

Simple, no single mailing domain or mail server could possibly sustain 100,000 bounces returned or 100,000 complaints upon sending out a million spams in a day...NONE Sure the servers themselves could handle it, but the ISP ould most certainly be discussing this with their clients and fairly quickly all the worst spammers of the world would be identified by domain and mailing ip and therefore easier to block at the isp level.

There would still be the issues of compromised workstations and viruses/trojans that send spam from innocent end users, but they too would be identified and blocking could occur.