Slashdot Mirror
Legitimate Business Spam
TreeRat sent us a Salon story by Simson Garfinkle about legit companies and spam. Its an interesting piece: it talks mostly about Caldera, but mentions several other offenders. The Spam in my INBOX is somewhere aroung 20-30 a day (mind you most of it is press releases from PR firm mailing lists, and random lists that "helpful" slashdot readers subscribed me to). Thank god for filters. But this is a problem we don't think as much about -- normally we think of spammers as slimeballs in basement sending out a hundred thousand emails advertising 'printer toner sale' or 'hot naked sluts want you'
featuring 900 numbers and typos, not legitimate businesses.
Some reasons why I complain about spam:
- It costs ME money. I PAY for my net connection. My snail mailbox is free. Junk that goes in there I didn't pay for. The company sending it did. Spam is like mail coming postage due. Imagine getting a flyer from your local grocery store and being REQUIRED to pay $0.50 to receive it. Spam is like that. You don't even get the choice to deny it. You are FORCED to pay for it.
- The free aspect of it means that anyone can send it to everyone. Think about it -- I get at least two or three ads in my snail mailbox a day that are for local stores. What prevents these local stores from telling the world about themselves via snail mail? Cost. There is no real cost for spam. Now take each city with a population over 10k in America, multiply that by 3, and you can see how useless your email box will be 20 years in the future. "Would you like to download the 30,000 messages you received last night?".
- Much spam is offensive. In real life (in the US) there are laws to prevent the mailing of smut. If you get it once and complain, that company is liable for some serious fines. Fines that the state will chage them with. You don't even have to worry about getting the smut again. But there are no such laws for spam, so if some company advertising "Boys 10 and under, star in a porno picture and make $$$" wants to advertise (from a country where this is legal) to young boys, they can without repurcussions.
- The fact that snail mail spam is so easily traceable keeps it reasonably legit. Not so with spam.
- And, that brings me to my last point. Most spammers DON'T want to be found out, so they CRACK servers on the internet, they DENY service, and do other nasty things so they can anonymously mail things out, and let the brunt of the attack fall on someone else.
As you can see, spammers are nothing more than cheapass sleazeballs, willing to sell crack to 10 year old boys so they can get them into their latest pedophile picture. Disgusting.
Another example of an externality is pollution. By polluting, a company may be able to do business more cheaply (because it doesn't pay to clean up its emissions) but this foists off the costs upon others, in the form of damaged property, sickened people and animals, and other losses.
If I run a chemical company, I have no right to lower my production costs at the expense of giving you cancer or chloracne. Similarly, if I run an online business, I have no right to lower my costs of advertising by forcing you and your ISP to pay for the bandwidth and disk space incurred by my ads.
Insofar as a chemical company is dumping PCBs in my water, making me sick or stupid, that chemical company is not being a legitimate business; it is being a criminal business. Similarly, insofar as an online business is forcing its advertising costs on me, it is not a legitimate business.
As the person at a web host (dreamhost.com) who deals with it, it does cost. Some spammers abuse our resources so much, we have no choice but to cancel their accounts (this is our policy - immediate cancellation w/o refund). Load on our servers increases, it interferes with legitimate user processes, and so on.
The time it takes to deal with this, plus the cost of bandwidth and server load, is passed on to our customers. They pay for someone else's 'free' advertising.
Then, there's the other side of the coin. The ISP who has to receive the spam passes on the exact same costs to _their_ customers. It's a bad thing all around, except for the spammer.
This isn't even mentioning the time the recipient has to spend sorting through it all, the fact that children receive the exact same porn spam, that it's illegal in some places, and that it legitimizes the practice.
In the end, these people are forging headers and are usually blatantly breaking the rules that their provider lays down. I don't have any sympathy for the creeps, and wouldn't mind if certain terrible things happen to them.
- Jeff A. Campbell
- VelociNews (http://www.velocinews.com)
- Jeff
> What do you mean legislation isn't going to work? You can't just say that without
> backing it up.
*BEEP* News Flash, this just in... The world does not consist of one country. Not all companies are headquartered in the same country. No industry can be controlled by the laws of any country. I reference copyright laws of the U.S. and piracy in China. I reference crypto laws of the U.S. I reference censorship laws of the U.K. and the movement of British protest sites to other countries. I reference the DeCSS trial and the associated broadcast over Australian T.V.
You cannot legislate a world economy.
I didn't mention that because I assumed that was common knowledge among the Slashdot crowd.
Quoting from the Hacker's Lexicon:
"(...) 5. To mass-mail unrequested identical or nearly-identical email messages, particularly those containing advertising. Especially used when the mail addresses have been culled from network traffic or databases without the consent of the recipients."
If its email, and its trying to sell me something I didnt ask for, its spam
Oxymorons.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Bowie J. Poag
No way! What we really need is to get even MORE FREAKED OUT over it. Spam adds about $2 - $3 a month to the cost of Internet access in the US. Wouldn't you like to save $3 a month. How about if saving that $3 meant not getting any spam?
You've obviously never administered a mailserver. Do you now what happens when a spammer does a dictionary attack on your Sendmail box? I'll tell you. You get to spend the next twelve hours cleaning up the mess, that's what! You have hundreds of angry users calling YOU up, and bawling YOU out, because they didn't ask for this turdlet MMF scheme or PR0N in their inboxes, and don't know who to complain to (but they've got your number, sure enough). Meanwhile, you have to order more memory, install another 6Gig hard drive, and additional bandwidth, just to get things back to a usable level? Multiply that $3 per user, per month by 100,000.
Then try to tell me not to get freaked out.
Yeah right, "just hit delete". Try it for 100,000 users. IT DOESN'T SCALE!!!
See, the problem with your thinking, is that you're only really thinking about you. But it's not just YOUR problem. If it takes three days to locate and disconnect an active spammer, just how many emails has he sent in that time. How many million "Just Hit Delete"s before you get the point? How many ISPs are there, passing the cost of controlling this problem along to their customers at how many millions of dollars expense?
How 'bout a little back of the envelope calculations, here...
Let's see, $36/year times 100,000 for a largish ISP, or $3.6 Million per ISP. OR for AOL, which gets TWICE as much spam $72/year time 15 million, (spam cost AOL $1.08 Billion? You have the gall to say JUST HIT DELETE?).
Every spam I get will result in some luser getting whacked from the 'net. Guaranteed. No questions.
> You gain nothing by being rude to the caller. He/she is just someone making not much money, and will no power to make it stop.
No, they have a moral obligation to society to get another job.
A friend that used to work in the trama ward at the local hospital used to tell the telemarkters that he was the one that would be putting them back together if they wrecked their car on the way home and he can do his job much better if he got some sleep.
The only difference I've noticed between honest companies and spammers is at least the honest companies will give you a way off the list and give a valid address up front. Not much better then the spammers but every little bit helps.
I've got a couple of ways to deal with spam. The first and most effective is to keep more than one email address. My main address is only available to friends, colleagues, and a mailing list or two. Another one is the "public" address, which gets used for site registrations and that sort of thing. I don't really care as much if that address gets spammed, because it's easier to ignore and filter it there. My other strategy for dealing with spam is to have a boilerplate ready for incoming junk mail. It's nice & lawyerly, and while I can no longer remember where I got it or whether it's actually accurate anymore (can't be bothered to check the US code), it's sufficiently intimidating that I assume it keeps at least some of the marketers away.
It has been pointed out to me that such a strategy might be flawed, however. for one thing, spammers can easily fake the address, so the boilerplate might go to a nonexistent or innocent party. Maybe so. More importantly, marketers might see any address that sends bck a reply -- even an 'unsubscribe' request -- as being live and worth spamming more in the future. Good point. These friends tell me that it's more effective to pass along the offending message to the kind folks at nospam.org (?- i think) instead.
Even still, sending out that boilerplate makes me feel a lot better, even if it isn't having the biggest impact. Short of carrying out my real wish (that is, to have marketing declared as a capital offense, punishable by anyone within range of the offender whether or not they are an appointed agent of the law), sending it back makes me feel a whole lot better, and I fully encourage you all to share, distribute, and use it as well...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
CT, you've really brought up one of my pet peeves. I hate it when the 900 number have typos... uhhh, not that I ever call those things... Just checking them out so that I can collect information for my Anti-SPAM lawsuit, you see... Yeah, that's it, collecting information!
-Jordan Henderson
[ ] I would like exciting news.
About what? When? exciting? pfffft
[ ] I want anouncments of product updates.
Does this mean that every time the programer farts in his code he's going to send out an update to inform me that: "wondersoft has updated 1.2.3 to 1.2.4"?
[x] Please do not add me to the mailing list.
OOOoooo the pre-checked box. Does unchecking it mean Yes or No? Is the list a shared user list or one way company PR newswire thing?
I believe that if companies were more forthcoming about when and what they send to your email, people would feel less over welmed when it happens.
___
Serious question: Has anyone here at /. actually *ever* bought a good or service that they learned about through spam? Or, do you guys know anyone who has?
Observe, reason, and experiment.
Observe, reason, and experiment.
(if you're too dumb, just pray)
Hell, just look at all the human time I've wasted typing this up-- the time I spent outlining this mess exceeds my spam-removal time by a factor of 10, at least. It's silly. Let's just hit delete and let it go.
(at further risk of being modified up the wazoo) Why is it that we always talk about "voting with our dollars"? Hell, as a nation, we hardly bother to vote with our votes. Sure, where you put your cash makes a sort-of political statement, but actually making political statements, contacting your reps (they're nice folks, even the pig-fuckers) and voting at every freaking opportunity really does a much better job of it.
Much Love,
"S"HM
*****
(I refuse to spellcheck out of contempt for your belief system)
Congress should order the Federal Communications Commission to create a nationwide list of people who do not wish to receive junk e-mail. Then it should target pornographers by making it a crime, with a $1,000-per-violation penalty, to send e-mail that advertises a sexually explicit Web site to any of those registered e-mail addresses. If this system works, it could then be expanded to other domains, such as "get rich quick" schemes and eventually to unsolicited advertisements of any kind.
Why is it bad? First of all, it legitimizes opt-out lists, which is what spammers want. Not only will they think they'll be free to send us their junk, it'll cost us. We'll still be in the same situation that we are in now.
Second, it doesn't address the potential of abuse hidden in unverified opt-in lists. To recap, verified opt-in lists send you an e-mail asking if you really want to subscribe to a list before actually subscribing. This is done no matter what method is used to subscribe. Unverified Opt-in just spams you in a haze wondering who the !)@)*#( signed you up.
Third, it doesn't address the best current practices as subscribed in the RFC's. There are many RFC's out there dealing with spam now. I suggest everyone read them. Faqs.Org has them.
There are better ways of success. Spread the word. Remain calm. Kill spam.
---
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com." The purpose of that site was not known. -- MSNBC 10-26-1999 on MS crack
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Push media are media such as spam, or telemarketers, or junkmail that shove their information down your throat. Pull media are media such as a website, or a TV show, or a radio program, that you actively access.
Most consumers usually prefer pull media because they prefer then they only access the information they want, while most businesses usually prefer push media, because then they can share their information with people that "might not know they want our product".
The argument for corporations using push media is fatally flawed. Simply consider it as this. If all the corporate websites in the world, which are currently pull media, suddenly became push media tomorrow, the web would crash to a halt within hours.
Why? Every corporation would email every person on the web one copy of their website. That's somewhere around 100 million or so websites times 100 million some users. In other words, approximately 10 quadrillion email messages of, let's conservatively say 1K each, or approximately 10,000 terrabytes of information sent out in one morning.
This is obviously NOT technologically feasible, nor is it efficient, nor do I want to erase 100 million spam messages from my emailbox in the morning. Clearly pull media must become the default method of communication.
Unfortunately, we cannot fight this with legislation (yes, if you're a U.S. politician reading this, sorry to burst your clueless little bubble). I see only two ways to fight this. One is with technology, as we have been doing with blackhole lists to filter email from senders of spam. Unfortunately, this only works against obscure porn sites and "Do YOU want to make 4 gazillion dollars from the comfort of your own home?" offers.
For legitamite businesses we need a different approach. It is simple though, rely on capitalism to work it's magic. Boycott any company that doesn't follow two simple rules:
1. Use pull media primarily for all customer communications.
2. Use push media only when specifically requested by the customer.
I already do this myself, and I urge you to do the same. As soon as it becomes "socially unacceptable" for companies to use push media, they will not do so, but it will take persistence. If you want to be helpful, bitch about how annoying spam and telemarketers are to your friends. This might sound unproductive, but it's the most beneficial thing you can do. If you complain to enough people about it, it will amplify (or seed) their dislike of it, and eventually everyone will dislike companies that spam.
When that occurs, mission accomplished, the consumers control the communication.
is that in the business world, we vote with our dollars. If we receive spam from a fly-by-nighter, we just don't use their product (not that we would anyway). But what do we do when we get spam from Sony[TM]? Again, we must vote with our dollars, and make it clear that we will not buy their product until they cut out the immature marketing style.
And that's the problem. I want to make my voice heard, but I want to buy cool, sexy tech toys even more so. I don't wanna stop buying Sony stuff. So when I see a cool company sending spam, I'm forced to choose between buying to make a political statement and buying because the product is good.
thin is the line we tread.
Judge Pag, the Learned, Impartial, and Very Relaxed