The problem with this idea is that spammers don't use their own computer, they borrow other people's computers to send the spam. It also heavily penalizes people who legitimately need to send bulk email.
Aka spammers.
These have a lot of iffy issues.
* Since they're going to be generated by the ecommerce service, it may not be running on the same server or IP block as your main mail infrastructure, so you might have to specially configure around that.
* The content-- hundreds of messages a day, at seemingly scattershot recipients and highly templated-- screams spammy nto the wrong algorithm.
Yeah, there's services like Mandrill, but the whole ecosystem feels broken. It's not serving mailers. It's not serving the recipients very well. It seems designed to please a small, delicate, vocal audience. The people so upset at the prospect of false negatives (spam in the inbox) that they rally around providers who are prone to aggressive false positives. Who are these people and what makes them tick?
I could see this backlash in a situation where it's high risk or cost, but users can manage their own filters in any half-decent mail system, and frankly, clicking through a few pieces of spam a week is not a big deal-- arguably far less a hassle than spending an hour on the phone to get a tracking number that a spam filer ate.
I work for an email marketing provider (opinions my own, obviously), and I was extremely surprised how many people genuinely want to receive lots of commercial bulk marketing email. And by "want to" I don't mean "don't mark as spam", I mean "continually sign up for different marketing newsletters, and consistently use links in newsletters/marketing emails to make purchases from multiple companies". It's an alien phenomenon to me, and it may be a minority of bulk email, but it definitely is useful to a lot of people. Maybe it's their equivalent of coupon-clipping-based shopping, or maybe they just like learning about things to buy in that format? I have no idea.
That aside, the last thing an email marketing platform wants to do is send spam. Every time someone marks an email such a provider sends as spam, the reputation of their sending addresses is damaged, and therefore their ability to deliver mail to aforementioned people who want to receive them (and therefore the ability of the marketing platform to make money by facilitating that kind of desired email) is jeopardized.
TL;dr there's bulk marketing email and then there's spam, and surprisingly little overlap (and overlapping incentives) between the people who send each.
I have a couple of broad categories for these filters like car stuff, computer stuff, other-hobby-related-stuff and of course clothing, and just take a look at the appropriate one when I need or want something. Takes virtually no time, and saves a lot of money.
Of course I'm not gonna lie, I do end up buying things that I wouldn't have bought otherwise by doing this. But some of those things are pretty cool, too. :) I do have a few more cheap ARM boards of various types than I can probably use, though.
> Hashcash was proposed in 1997 by Adam Back[1] and described more formally in Back's paper "Hashcash - A Denial of Service Counter-Measure".[2]
The quantity-above-quality model in the spam industry probably lead to low-quality or vague list criteria. Broad demographic groups and domains. A lot of third party data of questionable legitimacy. If you've been running the list a long time, some "email address [email protected] clicked on campaigns A and B" data. You might be able to say on a large scale "List A is likely to convert better than B", but it still comes down to spray-and-pray at the individual address level.
If you went to a spammer with a few "sucker lists" of 100k emails each, and told him "you can only send 1k per day", will he have the data to triage his list to get a decent return on it anymore?
This would also snowball over time. Without being able to do high-volume campaigns initially, they'd have a harder time building up the knowledge they can use to manage their lists, and the quality would decline over time.