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Work Spam is Timed
Jun. 13th, 2023 09:03 amIt struck me a week ago: the spam I get on my work email account— all the ticklers from all the companies I've had to give my email address to to sign up for a webinar, and all the companies that have scanned my badge at trade shows— is timed.
Last Tuesday I checked my work email early in the morning (6:30 ~ 7am) then was OOO for a few hours and didn't check email again until noon. At 7am I had maybe 3 ads in my mail queue, lighter than normal for my first-of-the-morning check. By noon another 20 ads waiting for me. Eyeballing them all together, I noticed they were pretty much all timestamped between 7:50-8:50am. That's when it struck me: junk mail is timed. It's timed to maximize the chance a person reads it. Thus it's clustered in the 8-9am hour in your local timezone, ostensibly so that it's at the top of your backlog when you're logging in for the first time, or arrives after you've cleared your backlog.
BTW it's not at all surprising that junk mail is timed. Corporate social media systems are timed to maximize engagement. Dropping a tweet, say, at 11pm in a target market isn't effective. Most people are offline for the night, and by the time they check their feeds in the morning over breakfast that 11pm tweet will be so far down few people will see it. Time that tweet to drop at 7am or 8am, and a lot more people will see it.
Once I spotted this pattern last Tuesday I made a point of looking for it again— to test how much of a pattern it is. Oddly I didn't get much spam Wednesday through Friday. Yesterday (Monday) morning I had some, but not quite as much as last Tuesday. Then I logged in this morning— and BOOM! Huge load of spam. So these common marketing tools are not just timing it to the 7-8am hour but also picking Tuesday as the day likely to get the most attention.
Last Tuesday I checked my work email early in the morning (6:30 ~ 7am) then was OOO for a few hours and didn't check email again until noon. At 7am I had maybe 3 ads in my mail queue, lighter than normal for my first-of-the-morning check. By noon another 20 ads waiting for me. Eyeballing them all together, I noticed they were pretty much all timestamped between 7:50-8:50am. That's when it struck me: junk mail is timed. It's timed to maximize the chance a person reads it. Thus it's clustered in the 8-9am hour in your local timezone, ostensibly so that it's at the top of your backlog when you're logging in for the first time, or arrives after you've cleared your backlog.
BTW it's not at all surprising that junk mail is timed. Corporate social media systems are timed to maximize engagement. Dropping a tweet, say, at 11pm in a target market isn't effective. Most people are offline for the night, and by the time they check their feeds in the morning over breakfast that 11pm tweet will be so far down few people will see it. Time that tweet to drop at 7am or 8am, and a lot more people will see it.
Once I spotted this pattern last Tuesday I made a point of looking for it again— to test how much of a pattern it is. Oddly I didn't get much spam Wednesday through Friday. Yesterday (Monday) morning I had some, but not quite as much as last Tuesday. Then I logged in this morning— and BOOM! Huge load of spam. So these common marketing tools are not just timing it to the 7-8am hour but also picking Tuesday as the day likely to get the most attention.
