The rise of bot spam in 2024

I told someone in a candid way, “You must be on some list.” That was the truth. It was worth noting (I was just on a call with Nvidia yesterday listening to their assessment of the situation too): A lot of sales spam is actually an escalation attempt, so you have to be vigilant in having a strategy to automatically reject most inbound communication attempts outright. Big companies are getting good at auto-flagging and rejecting using AI, such as Microsoft, Nvidia, and others. However, you still need an inbound strategy for baseline mitigation, because you do need to get some outreach to hit your inbound teams — something that will ultimately make it harder to reject malicious outreach disguised as a sales pitch.

I don’t even do email anymore and haven’t in years. Well, I do it still, but only have a small list of contacts that I accept, usually having to do with my lawyer, government (local/state/fed) agencies that I know may reach out to me, direct vendors or partners, and people I’m prospecting. That’s it. Unfortunately, a lot of inbound in 2024, especially emails, are robot-generated, fake, and also have malicious intent. Be warned — these people are getting good at total extraction while looking like sales agents. There are some issues, but even smart big teams are having trouble getting ahead of it all.