I was having a catchup with an industry colleague. She asked me where I get my market intelligence from. I said my email junk folder and I wasn’t joking.
I get a hundred or so spam emails a day. Doing what I do means having dozens of email addresses exposed to the internet and connected to various customer support platforms. (If you’re on the receiving end of this in Zendesk, read about the spam relay problem.) Automations are always trying to sell me stuff I’m not looking to buy. We all see these emails and bin them, but they’re actually worth reading. Bear with me.
I keep an eye on competitor launches and pricing changes buried in “exciting updates” via the Deltastring news aggregator but sometimes these things are discovered through marketing junk. What I get excited about is the craft of it. Fake forwards in there to create a context: “You have to see what the Zendesk expert Nico Boyce says about this.” Weird email headers and the sender domain, reply-to domain and email signature domain all different. Probing questions designed to provoke a response, any response. “Reply with STOP and I’ll leave you in peace” so you engage instead of marking them spam. These people are studying human behaviour and testing what works. Every email is an experiment. There is genuine intelligence in my junk folder.
The B2B spam flatters you. It positions you as the authority. “As someone leading CX transformation at your organisation…” It assumes you’re important and that your time is valuable and that its product needs your approval. The dynamic is: we built something, you’re the expert, would you take a look? It’s manipulative, obviously. But the manipulation works because it respects the shape of how buying decisions actually happen. Someone with authority evaluates a product and decides.
When LinkedIn launched in the early 2000s it would connect your email account to find your contacts. What it actually did was email every single person you’d ever corresponded with: “Jimmy wants to connect with you on LinkedIn.” It made everyone furious. Doug Stanhope said “Don’t get a LinkedIn, the spam is endless” on his DVD of the day and he’s not exactly Paul Graham. Everyone knew the platform built its entire user base on spam.
Nowadays the spam is the thing itself. The dynamic is reversed. Our once chronological updates from actual colleagues have been systematically replaced with targeted guff, reducing all to grey goo, exploiting fears and prejudices. AI-written carousels. Engagement bait ending in “agree?”. Inspirational stories that definitely didn’t happen to the person posting them. Every post positions the poster as the authority and the reader as subordinate. You’re here to learn. You’re here to be impressed. Hit the button and ride on my coattails. Overreaction is the only way to be heard. I scrolled past a dozen LinkedIn posts this morning before I found something that didn’t read like ChatGPT, and they weren’t even saying anything interesting. Dead internet theory needed a flagship product and it found one.
My spam folder is full of humans studying how other humans think. LinkedIn is full of machines that stopped trying. LinkedIn is behind spam email for AI-generated social engineering and that should bother more people than it does.
I read my junk folder most mornings now. I learn more from it than I do from any professional network.