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The Federal Trade Commission's Mail Order Rule applies here. It's real simple:

1. Mail orders must ship within 30 days unless there was an explicit delivery date specified. If the seller knows there will be a delay in shipping, they must contact the customer and offer the customer a full refund or the option to wait another 30 days, at the customer's choice.
2. After 60 days, the seller must provide a full refund unless the customer explicitly consents in writing to a further delay. If the customer takes no action, the refund must be sent.

Staples paid a big fine for this. So did the Beanie Baby people. In the early days of the Internet, a lot of companies were hit by this, because they had web sites accepting orders at high speed, but the back end fulfillment operation was manual and couldn't keep up. Now, most serious online merchants have the ordering system tied to the inventory system, so they stop taking orders when the inventory is used up,

little profit in spam from a legitimate business

While the meaning of "legitimate business" may be debated with regards to the businesses that employ spam, the profit is indisputable. Here is someone who made millions before age 28 from spam. There is also an Olympic skier who is a millionaire spam mogul. Here is yet another spammer who made millions off of spam. Most of the top spammers on the SpamHaus list are doing quite well financially as well - well enough that many of them jet around the world with their spam profits.

The spammer can only profit because their overhead is being spread to unsuspecting users on a global scale.

That statement doesn't match reality. The money the spammers pull in could easily purchase a cluster to pump out spam. However the botnets create one element of the great game of spam whack-a-mole in how difficult they are to shut down as they dynamically resize and pull in new nodes.

And if you look at how much the spammers pay their ISPs, you'll realize that the spammers are in no way hurting for money.

The issue is neutrality and censorship

While I don't necessarily doubt that ISPs are salivating at the pay-per-byte thing, the whole truthout.org thing is a figment of your feverish imagination, fueled mostly by your insane hatred of Microsoft. At the very least you should research your claims before using them in any sort of cuasi-authoritative way.

Go ahead and read through these and then come back and tell me that "M$" or Google or Yahoo or any ISPs are blocking *anything* related to truthout.org at all. And please don't reply to me with your name trolls or sockpuppets.

http://directmag.com/disciplines/email/truthout_blocked_censorship/

Online political group Truthout.org is crying foul over Hotmail and AOL blocking its e-mail from reaching subscribers.

But rather than conducting an internal assessment of its e-mail program to find out why it's having delivery troubles at two of the largest providers of e-mail inboxes, the organization's executive director, Marc Ash, is calling on subscribers to pressure the ISPs into delivering their mail.

http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss@isoc-ny.org/msg00354.html

1. If two large ISPs independently begin blocking mail from
a given domain/IP address/network block/etc., then it's usually
a pretty good sign that there is an issue with the mail source.

http://mainsleazespam.com/collateral/truthout_org.html

truthout.org email server at IP 38.114.2.39 has been caught up in a widening list of IP space at cogentco.com blocked by spews.org, a widely used blocklist to protect against abuse from spam supporting ISPs. ...
So, while truthout.org is in no way listed itself as a spammer, the email coming from this IP appears at the moment to be caught up in a widening blocklist of cogentco.com IP space due to their inaction to stop abuse from their network by others.

http://sethf.com/infothought/blog/archives/001260.html

I saw this story earlier today. While I do go to truthout, I was not a subscriber. So I set up a Hotmail account, subscribed to truthout's newsletter, and immediately received the confirmation email from truthout. No blockage whatsoever.

In reading the comments from readers, there were claims that even emails that had the phrase "truthout.com" somewhere in the mail -- for example, I send you a mail and say "please read this article from truthout.org" -- were also being blocked. I tested this as well several times from several email accounts, both sending to and receiving from the new Hotmail account. It worked perfectly fine every time.

I even clicked on the "email this story link" in a truthout story and sent it to the hotmail account. This, of course, worked fine as well.

Truthout's credibility took a serious hit last year with Jason Leopold's reporting on Karl Rove. It seems they are about to take another. As someone who has seen the Microsoft legal team from the inside, I'd hate to think what they'll do to Marc Ash and truthout.org if these claims aren't removed and an apology issued.

http://directmag.com/mag/marketing_oldest_scam/ it at least dates back to 1854, i don't know if that quite qualifies as the 'oldest' scam, personally i thought the oldest scam was pillaging. that came along with the bronze age, if it wasn't already popular in the stone age. (having better weapons allows you to pillage, for a living, without worrying they'll uprise)

So, you completely ignore the first article which is evidence of can-spam non-compliance (failure to honor removal requests in a timely fashion), and seek to discredit a post based on one URL used as evidence. Here's a thread with samples. Direcmag New York Times. Legitimate information is legitimate information regardless of the source. Your point is well taken however regarding the signal/noise ratio on NANA*.

Spamming with your FUD eh Khaed? Perhaps you should go to jail?

Wow, are you that stupid? This is a discussion, and I'm not advertising "v1agr4." What crawled up your ass that me complaining about spam invoked such an angry response?

Forged headers: free speech doesn't protect lying.

That's not what I was saying, and you know it. Spammers fake being from other domains using the forged headers, which is quite a different thing from lying.

A huge percentage huh? Gotta real number?

Sure do, Skipper: 90%, up from 80% in 2005. I'd say either number qualifies as "huge."

As for what the ISP or user wants, are you a mind reader? Speak for yourself. I'm perfectly capable of deciding what I do and do not want myself.

ISPs have went after spammers on many occasions, pursuing every legal option, and in some cases pushing for more. Do I need to cite all that? Also, the post I responded to is titled "nobody likes spam." Are you asking for a cite from parent, too? Seriously, do you need a scientific poll on what users feel about spam? Because we both know that it would be pretty lopsided against spam. Are you honestly arguing that ISPs and users like spam?

I didn't want to read your bullshit drivel, and it certainly took me far longer to respond to it than simply ignore it.

Well, when I send it to your personal or work e-mail, instead of posting it on a public discussion site, then you can complain.

just because you're acting like an annoying fucking prick.

Well hello there Pot...

Just to clarify, "worst offender" is probably a little too harsh.

They sold your information just like the American Cancer Society, Krogers, the NRA, Focus on the Family, Time Magazine and just about every other business/charity does. This is the basis for targeted mailing lists coupled with massive databases like those maintained by Acxiom.

"Specialty selects" are commonly available and the more targeted the information, the higher the cost for renting the list. For example, peruse this company sometime: http://www.infousa.com./ Then, to get a feel for the mindset of direct marketers, read up at http://www.directmag.com./

Point is, this is really standard stuff in mailing and marketing. It's been going on forever and be going away any time soon.

Interesting to note that a survey was done recently of the most trusted Government branches/offices/operations and the USPS was ranked #1. This is in direct contrast to the Executive Branch of government.

http://www.directmag.com/news/usps-022306/index.ht ml

MC Direct has served other nonprofit clients including the Smithsonian Institution Contributing Membership Program, National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the American Indian College Fund. The agency's business clients include Lucent Technologies, Microsoft, Bank of America and Intuit, among other Fortune 100 companies.

They announced this in March and said that it would begin testing phase "within six months." For you math whizzes out there, that means they finally released a project on time!

A brief search on google revealed the following (admittedly old) link about spam and email. I'm curious whether the reasoning would apply to the present case.

I'm surprised they said that. Here's what Hormel has to say now about SPAM and UCE.

In summary, they don't mind people using the word, "spam" when talking about UCE, but not "SPAM" (distinguishing all-caps as their product name). They also (fairly, I think) don't like their product associated with UCE (for example, slashdot's use of a can of SPAM for the UCE topic).

A brief search on google revealed the following (admittedly old) link about spam and email. I'm curious whether the reasoning would apply to the present case.

You really have to ask yourself, do you want to go and start inviting elitist journalist types who look down on us? I think the conceit of the media will be the only thing that keeps slashdot from turning into zdnet.

If you get an email from a Yahoo affiliate, and you are using Yahoo email, are you offended? I am not, but I want to have the power to stop receiving messages from that particular mailer. and every successful Internet marketing company knows that and gives you an easy way to get removed from the list (Yoyodyne, Digital Impact, Post Communications, etc.) Marketers are aware that you better not annoy your potential customer, or you might loose him or her forever. And that's even more true on the web, where the competitor is just a click away.

However, some regulation makes sense, mostly to take care of the stupid marketers. A gentle way to enforce some basic guidelines has been introduced in California:

Californi a Toughens Laws On Unsolicited E-Mail Ads