No, I’m not talking about the wondermeat (meat?) pictured to the left, but the wonderful phenomenon of email inboxes filled with delightfully useless, albeit annoying, messages from complete strangers.  Spam.

I made the mistake for quite some time of listing my personal email address on my websites.  I was much younger, and didn’t understand how easily it could be pulled off the web and thrown into a spam-spewing message machine.  For instance, my “contact” email address for this site (never actually listed anywhere publically) has accrued 763 spam messages over the last month.  How many legitimate emails has it received in the same time period?

Two.

The ironic thing is what the spam email is about.  Usually, we relate the idea of spam email to “male enhancement” products or online universities.  The majority of this spam, on the other hand, is directed towards legitimate, branded products.  If I were going to subscribe to DirecTV, though, it would be directly through the company, not through some obscure affiliate program.

How much do these affiliate programs hurt parent brands, though?  I mean I know that Apple isn’t really emailing me directly to ask me to purchase a new laptop, but the email itself is very well presented and lookes legitimate.  The fact that I never asked Apple to contact me or gave them my information makes the email annoying … particularly when it enters my inbox with 20-30 of its friends.

Does your business participate in affiliate marketing?  How much control do you weild over your affiliates?  Could they possibly be spamming people with your brand?  What would this mean for consumer appreciation of your actual marketing efforts?