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Ask to talk to a supervisor, it takes time and money to train them, regular employees are a dime a dozen, it has the advantage of costing the TM money, scaring the employee (at least if they're new,) and aggravating the supervisor:)

Yes. I really did not even need to sign up for the new list. It has been 2 years since I got a single telemarketing call. For a couple of years I used the "Anti-telemarketing Script" from the excellent Junkbusters website. It actually made dealing with telemarketers fun.

I recorded the date and time at the top of each form. Then asked the *long* list of questions. At the slightest bobble (usually when I insisted they add *all 3* of my phone numbers to their "do not call" list - which they didn't know how to do since they just had a check mark on the computer screen for the one number they had called -) I would ask for the supervisor and put them through the whole thing again. If they answered any of the questions incorrectly, I would read to them from the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

I filed every form in a folder I kept by the phone which also had lots of blank copies of the form. When a certain long distance telephone company continued to call me for 18 months after I asked to be put on their "do not call" list, I wrote my congressman, and eventually he urged me to file a formal complaint with both the FTC and the FCC." I sent every piece of documentation, including all the times I had asked to have a copy of their do not call policy sent to me, which they are required by law to do if requested, and which they had *never* done.

Turns out, they take the feds seriously! After that, I think I got put on a very special list which they must share with one another - the "Consumer Bitch from Hell" list. Never got another telemarketing call (except local businesses) from that day to this.

This will all be blindingly obvious to most readers of /., but just for the record:

Don't use your personal email address for anything online. Don't post to usenet with it, don't use it to register for anything, don't ever use it where there's any chance of it being sold to a third party or picked up by a web crawler. Use a free throwaway web-based account like hotmail or yahoo, that's what they're for. I have a verizon.net primary email address, and I've never received a single piece of spam from it.

However, I still have a forward-only email address from my university circa 1992. Back then, there was no spam and that address has to be on every spammer's list on the planet. I still get a legitimate email every year or two, but spam outnumbers these by at least 10,000 to 1. SpamAssassin does a surprisingly good job of identifying the garbage.

I also use a proxy to surf the web, as well as a large hosts file that reroutes requests to adservers to 127.0.0.1:80, combined with a utility that returns a transparent 1x1 gif to any request on port 80. And of course I use mozilla to block pop-ups and whatnot. I'm so used to surfing in this way that I always recoil in horror when I have to use IE on a naked, unprotected box. How on earth can anyone stand it?

As for more traditional types of spam such as telemarketers, there's the national do not call list. It's free, so there's nothing to lose. You'll also want to check out the many excellent resources at the Junkbusters website. One of the most useful features is a Junkbusters Declare page, which builds custom form letters for you that you can use to opt out of Direct Marketing Association junkmail, as well as telling your financial institutions, etc., not to sell your name to third parties. I used it, it's painless, and my privacy is protected.

Of course, it would be much better if we didn't have to jump through hoop after hoop just to get through the day without being pestered by morons.

This will all be blindingly obvious to most readers of /., but just for the record:

Don't use your personal email address for anything online. Don't post to usenet with it, don't use it to register for anything, don't ever use it where there's any chance of it being sold to a third party or picked up by a web crawler. Use a free throwaway web-based account like hotmail or yahoo, that's what they're for. I have a verizon.net primary email address, and I've never received a single piece of spam from it.

However, I still have a forward-only email address from my university circa 1992. Back then, there was no spam and that address has to be on every spammer's list on the planet. I still get a legitimate email every year or two, but spam outnumbers these by at least 10,000 to 1. SpamAssassin does a surprisingly good job of identifying the garbage.

I also use a proxy to surf the web, as well as a large hosts file that reroutes requests to adservers to 127.0.0.1:80, combined with a utility that returns a transparent 1x1 gif to any request on port 80. And of course I use mozilla to block pop-ups and whatnot. I'm so used to surfing in this way that I always recoil in horror when I have to use IE on a naked, unprotected box. How on earth can anyone stand it?

As for more traditional types of spam such as telemarketers, there's the national do not call list. It's free, so there's nothing to lose. You'll also want to check out the many excellent resources at the Junkbusters website. One of the most useful features is a Junkbusters Declare page, which builds custom form letters for you that you can use to opt out of Direct Marketing Association junkmail, as well as telling your financial institutions, etc., not to sell your name to third parties. I used it, it's painless, and my privacy is protected.

Of course, it would be much better if we didn't have to jump through hoop after hoop just to get through the day without being pestered by morons.

I use JunkBuster, which can block or spoof referrer info. Annoyingly, it defaulted to spoofing UserAgent, telling the outside world that I'm running a Macintosh 68K, so sites like download.com only showed me Mac software! It took me ages to fix that problem!

See www.junkbusters.org for details.

According to the TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act), it is illegal for a business to dial mobile phone numbers for unsolicited telemarketing. Unless there are some weird circumstances on how they got hold of your phone number, you've just earned yourself $500-$1500. Congratulations! You now just need to figure out how to claim it :)

A good resource for this kind of thing is Junkbusters

junkbuster blocked 15 images from loading in that one article.

I read the linked message in the original post and saw the phone number to call. After waiting for their normal office hours, I called and talked to a human. I asked that they not rent or sell my personal information or calling patterns internally or with their marketing partners.
The response was that the agent had removed my authorization to share that information among the different parts of qwest. This was not specifically what I asked for. So I called that to his attention and he said he would do that. On questioning about why it had not happened when I first asked for it, he said that you had to specifically ask for it.

Note that in the end, he just said he would take care of it.

I am crankish about snail spam and make it point to do my best about getting off mailing lists and I have learned there a number of sleazy companies out there. For instance, you have to not only get off a mailing list, but specify that your name not be rented or sold. Most people I think would not have caught the qwest deceit.

A good source of information on what to do about snail spam is junkbusters

I had lots of spam from Postmaster General, but i got filters set up on my email proggie. It eventually dwindled down. The Spam Offer helped a bit...

lazy Anonymous Coward that can't be bothered to create an accout.

The only time I have netscape (4.73) lock on me is on some far out dns calls to ad sites, or one of those "ping-pong" situations when News.com tries to hook up an ad. The best solution is to install Junkbuster and block ads.* etc, and a lot of the ad lookups go away. I think this mostly has to do with dblclk's cookie situation (it tosses about a dozen if you trap them) and the fact that one cookie goes to various servers in their empire. DNS makes a locking call for a lookup for some reason under netscape. Using a proxy such as squid (lost the url) will greatly reduce this problem.
good luck!

It also notifies you of invalid cookies being set and why they're invalid. I tried using Hotmail and Opera reported 4 or 5 invalid cookies.

And if that's not enough, you can always turn to the Internet Junkbuster for the ultimate filtering solution.

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Check out http://www.junkbusters.org/. You can run a little free open source proxy and pick which sites automatically that you want to auto-accept/auto-decline cookies for. Works quite well.