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SpamRecycle.com Prosecutes Spammers
relyt writes "If you get spam, check out Spam Recycle. Forward them your spam, and they will prosecute the spammers for you, giving you time to do other things. It is also is supported by CAUCE! Send them your spam, and their trained monkeys will poke it, prod it, and kill it. " Somehow I'm skeptical, but hey, I get spammed every 48 hours to buy toner and I don't even own a printer. Sure would be nice if it would stop ;)
I've never looked it up and verified it, but I got this little bit of legalese from some guy on USENET a long time ago, and have had it on my homepage ever since:
By US Code Title 47, Sec.227(a)(2)(B), a computer/modem/printer meets the definition of a telephone fax machine. By Sec.227(b)(1)(C), it is unlawful to send any unsolicited advertisement to such equipment. By Sec.227(b)(3)(C), a violation of the aforementioned Section is punishable by action to recover actual monetary loss, or $500, whichever is greater, for each violation.
IANAL, but maybe somebody out there is and can verify or debunk this.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If everybody honked their horn, all the time, when driving, nobody would be able to hear police sirens and move out of the way. So honking automobile horns should be made illegal.
The thing about spam that makes it different from situations like this is that spam consists of theft of resources. When you spam me, you are stealing my bandwidth and stealing my time (remember, "time is money). Therefore, spam is theft, plain and simple. But what is someone "stealing" from you when they honk their horn at you? That's right, nothing (well, they might be stealing some increased blood pressure and an obscene gesture or two, but that's beside the point).
Any questions?
=================================
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Most people aren't as passionate about fighting banner ads as they are spam because ads are just a small part of this page. You went to this web page to read a story or post a comment, and the ad comes with the territory. If all banner ads popped up in full screen windows, I'm sure the story would change and people would begin to complain more.
The same goes with spam. If advertisements were attached to the bottom of emails on mailing lists, I don't think many people would get as upset, since they're actually getting something useful out of the email (the discussion on the mailing list).
I think the main difference here is that spam is a push technology, and a banner ad is a pull technology. If you don't want to see a banner ad on slashdot, don't go to slashdot. If you don't want spam, you can't (easily) tell everyone to stop sending it to your mailbox.
"Make money fast! This is NOT a pyramid scheme!" (That's the best tipoff that it is.)
Kind of like the ones with "fwd: Fwd: [fwd] FWD: fwd: FWD: FWD: [fwd] Fwd: THIS IS NOT A CHAIN LETTER!" in the "subject" line...
This is a Chao. A Chao says "Mu."
No offers to buy spamming software?
Fight Spammers!
"just hitting delete" is the worst thing you can do. You harm the anti-spam cause when you give in to such complacency. If someone left pornographic pictures in your mailbox everyday, would you just say, "ahh.. necessary evil in life.." and throw it away? Stand up for your privacy and mail-box which *is* between you and the server. No one else has *any* right to it at all. At least report the offender to their upstream provider, which takes no less than a minute using automated systems like spamcop.net.
Regardless of what anyone thinks about spam,
the ACLU has an effort to ensure that spam
is protected under the Constitution. I have
been assisting them in this effort by forwarding
to them at freespeech@tjcenter.org a copy of
every example of spam that I receive. I am
sure that they appreciate the wide variety of
subject matter that I have provided.
H.R. stands for "House of Reprehensible" er, "House of Representatives." The bill got through the House, but never made it through the Senate, and was never signed into law by the President, so it means nothing.
Took them 3 months to get me off their mailing list so I'm not surprised.
Just another perl hacker in Bangkok
Toner? Sheesh, you're lucky.
Try getting spammed thrice a week with someone trying to sell you viagra!
The irony is, I'm 19 years old and im not exactly what you would call "sexually active".
Vorro
---------------------------
A wise man speaks because he has something to say.
A foolish man speaks because he has to say something.
____________________________
What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?
"Make me one with everything."
This server has been slashdotted! Hooah!
I usually just filter them via pegasus mail, granted I might have to unban compuserve someday... ;)
http://www.brightmail.com is an excellent way to reduce the amount of spam that you recieve. They act as a gateway -- you set your mailserver to "mail.brightmail.com", your login to user%host.com (note the % and not an @), leave the pass the same, and check your e-mail.
I've been using their service (it's free) for around a year, and the amount of spam that actually reaches my inbox has been reduced to pretty much zero! Check them out; no more spam =)
.- CitizenC (User Info)
And if everybody talked, all the time, in a concert all, nobody would be able to hear the music. So all talking should be made illegal in concert halls.
If everybody honked their horn, all the time, when driving, nobody would be able to hear police sirens and move out of the way. So honking automobile horns should be made illegal.
I'm sorry, your hypothetical scenario is as ludicrous as the two above. You'll have to come up with a stronger reason why spam should be made illegal.
I am not in favor of blanket approval of all spam, by the way, nor am I 'trolling' with this comment. I'm just pointing out that any 'ban' can be justified by raising extreme cases why it is needed.
But their spam was illegal in the first place so it seems unlikely that they would press charges.
--
RumorsDaily
>Honestly, for real, when you think about it, how is Spam a crime?
Denial of Service is a crime. You deny service (ie. shutdown) service on many small ISPs with huge spam floods and hacked open relays.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Fluxrad writes:
... It may be necessary to ask you if you want to recieve some other ads in the mail. If you don't...you get to click a button that says you don't want it.
Most people who post about *spam* (both solicited email and non solicited email)
Wrong. Spam is unsolicited. Solicited mail is not spam. Perhaps in casual speech, but you should recognize that difference in your "defense" of spamming.
Even slashdot isn't free. The price you pay for the content is the banner ad at the top of the page.
Naturally. Advertising is also one of the costs we accept for "free" services like television and radio broadcasting. But when someone spams me, I get no content; I get an ad. And I have to pay for it.
Depending on the needs of the site
You have just described solicited mail. Solicited mail, strictly speaking, is not spam. You have not described spam in any way. Spam is not derived from a site a person has visited, nor have they been given an opt-in checkbox. Sometimes they are given an opt-out choice in the spam, but this is irrelevant for what is 99% of the time a one-time mailing.
If you're against everything that "marketed email" stands for - then please. go home...throw away your TV and your radio....because that's how "free" content gets paid for. Advertising.
Now that you've gallantly defended solicited e-mail advertising, do you have anything relevant to the discussion at hand, which is about spam?
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Blah... at least when I get junk email it costs them between 20-30cents.. So, it really 'costs' them to anoy me. Unfortunately, with a free internet connection, it doesn't cost them any more money (which is none) to email 1,000,000 rathern than 1,000.
Our friends over at userfriendly painted the picture back in August of '99.
Here's the link. --
God is Real Unless Declared Integer
spamrecylce.org no work for me but .com does. werd
I used to get a lot of spam at my usa.mil (read .net) until I started putting the following at the end of every e-mail I sent out.
It was written for telemarketing over phones, but has also been applied to e-mail. I have yet to collect any amount of money, but the spam has stopped completely.
I've also gotten in a habbit of e-mailing the host where the spam was routed through... at the very least I can get the account canceled or get the company to pay better attention to their security.
-- schmidbj@.usa.mil (.net)
*******NOTICE**********
Pursuant to US Code, Title 47, Chapter 5,
Subchapter II, 227, any and all non solicited
commercial E-mail sent to the address above is
subject to a download and archival fee in the
amount of $1000 US. Sending an E-mail to the
address above denotes acceptance of these
terms.
"Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
-- Ernest Hemingway
Ever stop to think about the people who have no choice other than MS IE to use as a browser? For example, at my office, my workstation is NT4.0 and I have an incredibly limited set of applications. They're all MS products, but what can I do? Does this make me an MS toadie? Guess so.
It's ignorant people like you that make the rest of the world (and management, the people who make the actual decisions on where to spend money) think that Open Source is nothing but a bunch of free-software-loving hippies.
Want to help out the Open Source movement? Try not to sound like such a lunatic.
It seems that www.spamrecycle.org has pre-emptively taken itself down to avoid being slashdotted!
---
Epitaph
www.slashdot.org website has being opted-into our service. This is NOT a spam message, this is NOT a pyramid scheme, this is NOT an unsolicited email. This email has being solicited, opted-in and it contains legitimate information about getting money fast without doing any actual work while hot girls from our site will help you to relax and enjoy yourself. All YOU have to do is sit back and relax while you money make themselves. This is the BEST deal in town or even on the Internet. just call this number: 1-900-thisisnotascheme and you'll start earning money, credit and unprecedented amounts of love from our girls.
You can't handle the truth.
was that meant to be www.spamrecycle.com? .org doesn't exist.
.com -- of course. They're trying to make money out of this somehow. :)
---
Epitaph
I'm going to try this out on Eudora Pro's filters and see if it works well there too. Has anyone else tried it using Eudora Pro? I'd love to filter out the "hot young naked girls want you" junk I get from who knows where given I'm female and straight. :)
"Say no more..." - Monty Python
Metallica has opened a similar site...
Now starving artists can send in napster user logs to Lars Ulrich for free prosecution.
It would be, but he is calling them to make a legitimate business request. When that request is not honored, he has the right to phone again, and restate the request. There is no legally mandated delay between such requests, and until he has an indication that the request has been honored (or at least acknowledged), he may continue to restate that request using whatever communications technology makes his task more convenient. The expense of receiving that request repeatedly is simply an inevitable consequence of ignoring the consumer's desire.
-c.
--
Casey
More scratches on the cave wall, thanks be to anonymity.
Also, the point about free speech disregards the idea that the recipient should be able to ignore whatever free speech being said if they choose to. (I don't have to listen to the million moms in Washington this weekend, but THEY still have a right to march.) With spam, how can you ignore it?
For example, if someone called me on the phone today and started raving about black helicopters, I would have a very valid harassment complaint, wouldn't I? (Not about the message, but about it's means of delivery)
I think the law should reflect the spirit of the following statement. If the private individual did not ask for the spam, that private individual should not recieve it.
This is another view of the world.
CAUCE support has come to mean about as much as a TRUSTe banner. When you have an anti-spam group endorsing such obnoxious, unresponsive and lying spammers as FloNetwork, you know not to trust (no pun intended) it too much.
Sadly, it seems that just like the maintainers of the RBL, CAUCE doesn't have the cojones to bring the fight to the larger corporate spammers. Sure, taking on the Sanford Wallaces of the world was commendable, but this isn't 1997. The internet has evolved and we are now faced with entities vastly more insidious than some entrepreneur in a Miami basement. And when major abusers such as FloNetwork client buy.com (I hope y'all liked their Spring spam run, especially those who never signed up for their opt in list) keep spamming without any response from CAUCE and other likeminded groups, you know time has come to reconsider who the "good guys" really are.
Thing is, you should be able to decide you don't want to listen to people telling you things. If there's a man in the middle of a shopping centre telling you to "embrace Jesus", then that's free speech. If he followed you home and started shouting it through your letterbox, then that's harrassment. I don't think that's an unreasonable analogy. Anyone can put what they like on a website I decide to go to, but I should be able to decide what comes into my inbox.
And it doesn't have to be the government's decision to ban spam - they should allow the spamee to say thy don't want it. I realise I'm mostly preaching to the converted here (hmm, another religion analogy!)
Horns are a special case; they're meant to be used in emergencies, when all sorts of laws can be ignored. Honk a horn as a signal of nothing and you *are* breaking the law. If everybody honked horns during emergencies, there would be no problem. If everybody spamed who had a product and an email address, email would become worthless to everyone everywhere. An emergency requiring spam? Feh.
It's illegal under federal law (Title 47, Sec. 223:
... makes or causes the telephone of another repeatedly or continuously to ring, with intent to harass any person at the called number; or ... makes repeated telephone calls or repeatedly initiates communication with a telecommunications device, during which conversation or communication ensues, solely to harass any person at the called number or who receives the communication ... shall be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both."
"Whoever
This was passed in response to people war-dialing Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition 800 numbers. And don't believe you're protected by caller ID: 800 numbers are equipped with ANI (Automatic Number Identification), which gives the person you just called your name, telephone number, <b>and street address</b>. This is for the convenience of the retail operators of most 800 numbers (i.e. the people paying for the service), and is <b>not</b> blocked by whatever Caller ID service you're using.
If you war-dial, they not only have the right to sue you, they know exactly where to deliver the subpoena.
There's nothing illegal about each person getting a piece of spam dialing that 800 number, though. The only problem is the risk of giving up your home address for the purposes of junk mail or telemarketing.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
I get junk mail all the time in my postoffice box. I simply toss them in the trash can.
At least with email, you aren't killing lots of trees!
It really isn't that hard to delete it!!
blarr...
---
Sig Return: 204 No Content
Presuming of course that your representitive acutally reads their own email. Most probably don't and have a staff member read it. Have you been watching the congressional inquiry into the emails? Dan Burton obviously has never even used an email client in his life. At one point he was demanding an explanation into an email which did not contain a "to" header. The poor sysadmin was trying to explain to him that sometimes people press send before typing in an address. He just could not understand how such a thing could happen and was convinced that this was a part of a coverup. There is a line in the original Star wars movie.
"Who is more foolish? the fool, or the ones who follow him.". Makes you wonder who Mr. Burton "represents".
War is necrophilia.
No!
It's my web-site! Who granted you permission to determine who may or may not access my web site?
Just those that arrived yesterday... lol
For what its worth (146211) ... ... ... ...
Everybody's Doin It!! Do The BEST!!
Is Your Mortgage Interest Rate as LOW as 2.75...
This is Adult Related Material - You must be
Receive a FREE Brand NEW Pager
Make MONEY on the Internet Explosion! (16951)
Make MONEY on the Internet Explosion! (16951)
BECOME DEBT FREE TODAY!!
Want a University Diploma - Fast & Easy - No
Ever Wanted a University Diploma - Fast & Eas...
Ever Wanted a University Diploma - Fast & Eas...
Mailers...15 Million Addresses on CD
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Want a University Diploma - Fast & Easy - No
FREE YOURSELF FROM DEBT~TODAY!...
Sadly no hot teens this time around. Oh well. All I need to do is find a way of running my car on spam rather than petrol - then I'll be sorted.
The site is as useless as the spammers they want reported.
Error Occurred While Processing Request
Error Diagnostic Information
WaitNamedPipe returned FALSE.
Windows NT error number 121 occurred.
Well, first of all there's the fact that it's WEBMAIL...ugh.
:), but there are also lots of important security announcements that DO concern me. I don't want those shuffled into the "junk" folder.
:)
Secondly, are you subscribed to any mailing lists? When the only thing on the To: line is "bugtraq@securityfocus.com", then that mail will go into the bulkmail folder along with the spam. Now, a lot of the stuff on BUGTRAQ is about Windows and doesn't concern me
Also, this couldn't really work on a normal mail server (as a procmail rule, say) because you can have aliases (such as president@foo.com), and then the To: field will be that, rather than jtsidu3@foo.com. Oops.
However, you probably could filter (with procmail) any aliases/lists into their own mail folders, THEN do the described filtering. That might be useful, though not likely doable on Hotmail.
As for me, I have my own "spam-filtering" method...I have a throwaway webmail account
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
EHI (CHOOSEYOURMAIL-DOM)
162 North Franklin
Chicago, IL 60606
Domain Name: CHOOSEYOURMAIL.COM
Administrative Contact:
Oxman, Ian (IO318) Ian.Oxman@CHOOSEYOURMAIL.COM
CHOOSEYOURMAIL.COM
162 N. Franklin
Chicago , IL 60606
800-767-6606 (FAX) 312-236-4092
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Danner, Jae (JD10231) jdanner@IBLI.COM
International Business List
162 North Franklin St.
Chicago , IL 60606
312.236.0350 (FAX) 312.236.4092
Billing Contact:
Weiler, Sandy (SW6900) sweiler@IBLI.COM
IBL
162 North Franklin
Chicago , IL 60606
312-236-0350 (FAX) 312-236-4092
[ac@localhost /]$ whois ibli.com
162 North Franklin Street
Chicago, IL 60606
US
Domain Name: IBLI.COM
Administrative Contact:
Walters, Gary (GW4941) jdanner@IBLI.COM
International Business List
162 North Franklin St.
Chicago , IL 60606
312.236.0350 (FAX) 312.236.4092
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Danner, Jae (JD10231) jdanner@IBLI.COM
International Business List
162 North Franklin St.
Chicago , IL 60606
312.236.0350 (FAX) 312.236.4092
Billing Contact:
Accounts Payable (AP6696-ORG) sweiler@IBLI.COM
International Business Lists
162 North Franklin Street
Chicago , IL 60606
US
(312) 236-0350
Fax- (312) 236-4092
Wow what an amazing coincidence two domain, one for spaming another for killing spam same address, same phone, same fax. Gee, I wonder how they make their money!
Also, I think a lot of people need to think through the concept of "banning spam". There are significant free speech issues involved here. If the federal government restricts people's rights to send communications to private individuals, that is the "slippery slope" to the government controlling how individuals communicate.
Freedom of speech has a sibling that you seem to be forgetting. I am free to write this, and you are free to ignore it. UCE bypasses my right to choose what speech I wish to hear/read. It also circumvents my right to control MY PROPERTY, specifically my machines and my network. I do not allow persons unknown to me to paper the walls of my house with flyers and advertisements, why would I want them doing so to my inbox?
And, BTW, slippery slope arguments are utterly fallacious. There is no spoon, and there is no slippery slope. You have made no argument to support your claim that restricting UCE must lead to some draconian 1984 scenario.
--
"We're an apex predator with the fecundity of a base level herbivore... We're a virus with shoes..." RazorJAK
It's a shame that more network administrators don't make use of Sendmail's built-in mechanisms that deny forwarding of SMTP requests by default.
Simply stated, if you are mysite.org your mail daemon will not accept mail destined for someothersite.org from spammaster.com. You can use the M4 macro technique to create the sendmail.cf file.
Mechanisms for precise tuning include:
relay_hosts_only - Forces list of each host in domain.
relay_entire_domain - Setting this feature allows relaying of all hosts within your domain.
access_db - This enables the hash database /etc/mail/access to enable or disable access from individual domains.
relay_hosts_only - enabled by default.
blacklist_recipients - If set, this feature looks up recipients as well as senders in the access database.
accept_unqualified_senders - Normally, sendmail will not accept mail from a sender without a domain attached.
accept_unresolvable_domains - Normally, sendmail will refuse to accept mail that has a return address with a domain that cannot be resolved using regular host lookup.
relay_based_on_MX - Setting this feature permits relaying for any domain that is directed to your host.
So, sendmail is quite flexible, and will not inconvenience your users. Additionally, your access list is based on a database that you define. `;^)
Have a look at my database driven web site.
Yeah. Whattaya think?
Not spam per se, so feel free to mod this as off-topic. Does anyone know what the deal is with freshmeat? I've put their ad server (ads.freshmeat.net) into my junkbuster blocklist, but the ads still keep appearing. Has anyone encountered the same problem?
I don't watch TV, or listen to the radio, and advertising is a big reason why.
Also, trying to extend concept of a Slashdot banner ad to e-mail spam is ridiculous. I pay for my e-mail account. I pay for my bandwidth. The spam is not because I'm gettin something for 'free'. There is no service being provided to me.
If micropayments were possible, I might actually be willing to pay for Slashdot. Maybe I could pay $15/yr (ala JenniCam) for a banner ad free subscription or something. *grin* The banner ads do annoy me, even though I ignore them unless they're a Linux company I don't know about yet. Some of the animated gifs actually cause Netscape and X to use a fair amount of CPU and take it away from mpg123, or setiathome.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I thought you being on DALnet's #london was annoying enough, now I find you trolling on slashdot as well..... jeeez!
If you started getting a lot of them, you could filter spamcop.
Talk about you ironies...
JK
What would I do when I am not a citizen of the US?
Who does recycle my spam then?
Hotmail recently introduced their Bulk Mail feature quite recently.
The filter is simple: any email that doesn't have you in the To: or Cc: is moved to the Bulk Mail folder.
And since most spam use Bcc, you can rest assured some 99% of spam will never reach you.
I use to report spams to spamcop.net, but now with that feature, not anymore =)
Forward them my spam, and they do what with my email address?
:)
Compile a giant list and sell it to spammers? That's what I bet.
Of course, I have no idea if this is a legitimate service or not... just my inner paranoid speaking.
I think I'll just keep pressing "Delete" when I get spam.
The link works because one of the editors from the Slashdot gang saw one of these posts and changed the article to make it work. So, rather than wasting your karma on troll posts like that, why not put a little bit of thought into what you're saying?
kwsNI
Your post raises some good questions. But some are, perhaps, misguided questions.
Most people who post about *spam* (both solicited email and non solicited email) have the attitude that advertisements in the email form are somewhere being near breaking one of the 10 commandments. They argue with the appearance that what these advertisers are doing is morally wrong. While they don't intend to sound as such, that's the way most come across.
I believe that some of the tactics that email marketers use is blatantly abusive of the end user, but most are not. Have you considered suing slashdot, or perhaps andover for compensation for the bandwidth that it took to download the banner ad at the top of the page you're seeing now? if not...why? you didn't ask for the banner ad. It's a blantant infringement of your rights as an internet user.
Most people who are violently against any type of advertisement in their email are the same who don't realize the way economics work. Nothing is for free. Even slashdot isn't free. The price you pay for the content is the banner ad at the top of the page. I am willing to dispense a little of my time, or my ever so precious bandwidth to support sites like slashdot. These guys have to make a living somehow. And to keep the site free to us (at least monetarily speaking) is to sell some of their space to advertisers. Depending on the needs of the site, company, or what have you, and the service it produces. It may be necessary to ask you if you want to recieve some other ads in the mail. If you don't...you get to click a button that says you don't want it. But for people to criticize a practice that keeps alot of the things i like free, is just, ill informed.
If you're against everything that "marketed email" stands for - then please. go home...throw away your TV and your radio....because that's how "free" content gets paid for. Advertising.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
No, spam does not present free speech issues. I am as ardent a free-speech advocate as anyone, but it is well established that a "No Soliciting" sign is not a violation of free speech, and that disregarding such a sign is actionable -- even by constitutionally protected groups, such as a religion.
1. Not a public forum
My e-mailbox is not a public space by virtue of connecting to the internet, any more than my driveway or front door are, by virtue of being accessible by public roads. Or even my USPS mailbox -- "[A] letterbox, once designated an 'authorized depository', does not at the same time undergo a transformation into a 'public forum' of some limited nature to which the First Amendment guarantees access to all comers." Justice Rehnquist in U.S. Postal Service v. Council of Greenburgh, 453 U.S. 114 (1981) (skip down to Greenburgh)
2. The paper 'junk mail' analogy demolished
So how does paper 'junk mail' survive? Partly though lots of expensive lobbying, and partly through a special right granted to the USPS, whereby they have quasi-ownership of my mailbox. (The US is one of the few countries to have a "Statutory Mail Box Restriction") The USPS can even prosecute my neighbors for leaving a note in my mailbox that could have been mailed (18 U.S.C. 1725) even if I, as the owner of the mailbox permit and even welcome the hand-delivery. ("Greenburgh" and other cases) However, the USPS cannot 'choose' to deny delivery of "objectionable" bulk mail, per cases like Bol ger v. Youngs Drugs Prods. (1983) (though Judge Brandeis ruled they could 'choose' to refuse to deliver certain political newspapers in Milwaukee Social Democratic Pub. Co. v. Burleson, 255 U.S. 407 (1921) So much for freedom of the press)
However, to bring this back to 'spam', I as a private recipient can ban junk mail from my mailbox, by filing a form with the USPS. This has been upheld by the Supreme Court, despite the First Amendment arguments by the Direct Marketing Assoc. The whole DMA "free speech" argument for spam is based on a premise that has long been defeated for snail mail
3. Abuse of 'Opt-out' is a crime, and should be an additional charge
Finally, even if Federal Law requires an opt-out address, any savvy user knows that much of the spam on the Internet at large contains fraudulent opt-out options. Not only would 'opting out' put you at risk for 'harvesting' (and hence more spam), but most spammers are fly-by-night operators who are long gone by the time you hit 'reply'. In fact, a recent article investigated and found that the bulk of spam reaches dead addresses even for those foolish enough to accept the offer being made.
In short, such spam is useless to everyone, the sender, the potential customer, and the millions of 'innocent victims'. Most users never learn this, because they are conditioned to ignore the opt-out, after a few 'harvesting' opt-outs flood their e-mail with even more spam. Here one abuse (harvesting) creates a hospitable environment that supports another (fake opt-out), a cycle that repeats in many ways throughout the spam 'industry'.
If your workplace puts a fake (or placebo) certificate where the elevator inspection card belongs, is that not a crime even more serious than failure to have a timely inspection (the former is willful criminal intent, the latter may be an accident)? If a con artist is caught in the act of trying to cheat a citizen, is it just 'free speech' until they actually walk off with the cash? Similarly, a 'fake opt-out' should a crime separate from 'failure to comply with spam regs'.
As of April 19, 2000 at least 18 states had passed or were working on legislation to restrict or regulate spam. There are, of course, serious jurisdictional issues.
_____________
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
Does http://spamcop.net/ do the same thing? I am trying to see who does a better job in stopping SPAMs. I get a lot as well even though I try my best to avoid them (i.e. filters, anti-SPAM newsgroup posting, etc.). I look forward to receiving a reply on this.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Ant-Spam? :) I think you meant Anti-Spam. Why reject ants? [grin]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Spam Cop lets you paste your headers and text into a text window, automatically processes the headers, and gives you the option to send notification of the spamming to where it originated from. It's an easy way to fight spam, and I've personally helped get a couple of spam accounts killed with it.
For: spamrecycle.com
Chooseyourmail.com (SPAMRECYCLE-DOM)
162 North Franklin
Chicago, IL 60606
US
Domain Name: SPAMRECYCLE.COM
Administrative Contact:
Oxman, Ian (IO318) Ian.Oxman@CHOOSEYOURMAIL.COM
CHOOSEYOURMAIL.COM
162 N. Franklin
Chicago , IL 60606
800-767-6606 (FAX) 312-236-4092
Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
May, John (JM29529)
john.may@CHOOSEYOURMAIL.COM
CHOOSEYOURMAIL.COM
162 N. Franklin
Chicago , IL 60606
312-236-0350 (FAX) 312-236-4092
Billing Contact:
Weiler, Sandy (SW6900) sweiler@IBLI.COM
IBL
162 North Franklin
Chicago , IL 60606
312-236-0350 (FAX) 312-236-4092
Record last updated on 17-Apr-1999.
Record expires on 16-Mar-2001.
Record created on 16-Mar-1999.
Database last updated on 13-May-2000 09:12:16 EDT.
Domain servers in listed order:
AUTH00.NS.UU.NET 198.6.1.65
AUTH60.NS.UU.NET 198.6.1.181
From a press release at: http://www.messagingdirect.com/press/chooseyourmai l.html
"Included in the Execmail Web application is direct access to ChooseYourMail.com, a privacy sensitive, anti-spam company that delivers money saving offers via email to consumers. Unlike other email marketers, ChooseYourMail.com delivers their offers without collecting any personal information or revealing customers email addresses to anyone."
"In our program, the user is in complete control," said Oxman. "They say what offers they want, they say how often they want them and when they want them delivered. If you want to find Internet bargains without mortgaging your privacy or exposing yourself to spam then ChooseYourMail is the program for you."
"Founded in 1998 as responsible marketing alternative to "spam," ChooseYourMail.com is an ethical, private, "opt-in" e-mail marketing company that acts as a private sector infomediary between e-mail marketers, netizens and ISPs. ChooseYourMail.com also works with public interest groups and legislators at the state and national levels to craft and promote sound, effective, "anti-spam" legislation. As part of their anti-spam efforts, ChooseYourMail.com is a founding member of the Spam Recycling Center consumer assistance website at http://www.spamrecycle.com."
So, the parent company is in the spam business, it's just spam you've asked for!
t_t_b
(Hey! how come <pre> and </pre> aren't allowed tags?)
--
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Please...
"Have you considered suing slashdot, or perhaps andover for compensation for the bandwidth that it took to download the banner ad at the top of the page you're seeing now? if not...why? you didn't ask for the banner ad. It's a blantant infringement of your rights as an internet user."
Wrong, buddy. I do nothing, and I receive spam. It's completely passive on my part. It's like a telemarketting call: they initiate it, and enter my private space. With telemarketters, I can just ask them to never call again lest I persue legal action against them. I can't do the same with spam.
With banner ads on slashdot and the like: that's accepted when I choose to load the website. Being a proactive person, I installed Internet Junkbuster years ago, and continue to reap the benefits today. Again, a completely easy and legal way of avoiding unwanted advertisements -- something spam does not provide.
Perhaps you'll also claim Kuro5hin is somehow evil, too. When we do bring in ads (eventually), anyone with a user account has to opt in. If you don't have an account, you get a mixed-bag of ads. But I will personally (as an admin of the site) ensure that IJB has an updated blocklist containing the URL for the K5 ads so people can opt out even without an account. Something which Spammers don't even think of providing.
And if you do choose to opt-in for ads (supporting K5), you get to choose the advertisement classes you see. No more adverts for random things you don't want!
So before you paint everyone who doesn't like advertisements as some sort of evil person who wants to freeload: realise that they probably (like myself) dislike advertisements you cannot opt out of, like those wonderful advertisements positioned right above urinals. Captive audience, anyone?
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
lol - first off. i initiated "the discussion at hand", so i'm willing to bet i know what it's about. Basically, it's about the major difference between *spam* and email advertising. Unfortunately, being that i didn't explicitly state this, i generated a shitload of responses.
Just to reiterate - I am trying to defend email marketers who aren't sending to ill gained addresses, or what have you. The reason for the original post is that the vast majority of the internet going public has no idea of the difference. As for you, you seem to have a pretty good grasp on the situation, aside from an earlier comment about sending through open mail relays:
the great majority of all email goes through these relays. They are out there on the internet and available for use by anyone that needs to use them (i.e. email way-stations). While spam sucks, i wouldn't classify their use of these mail relays as part of their "immoral" actions. more of a by-product. I'm not too concerned how *spam* gets to me anyway...i'm pissed that it gets to me at all.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Error Diagnostic Information
WaitNamedPipe returned FALSE.
Windows NT error number 121 occurred.
I'm easily amused
-- Criggie
Hello there.
How can you defend spammers? How can any "email marketing firm" be doing the "right thing", when the whole idea of using *my* bandwidth, without paying me for it, is wrong in itself?
Or are there email marketing firms out there, that pay the people they send emails to, upon request?
As a system administrator for a local ISP, spam is a big time waster for us.
I don't care if it's illegal right now. What I do care about is that it's my job to make sure our customers can get their email in a timely fashion, that they can get their email without being worried about their children getting junk from the latest kiddie porn spammer. When our customers call and wonder why they are getting this junk in their mailbox, they want to know what we're going to do about it.
Well, we maintain mail filtering for those who want to use it, but I have to spend a significant amount of man-hours maintaining the filters and other tasks associated with keeping the mail system in shape.
In short, spam is a money-waster for ISPs. I could be spending more time doing the myriad of other tasks that need to be done to keep our customers happy. Spammers are cost-shifting their advertising onto us; every byte they are using on our internet connection and our mail server is costing us money. Our SMTP banner says "NO UCE." If we say we don't want it, it should be illegal.
There are several simple arguments against spam.
First, spam is a theft of service for the recipient. You are the one paying for your e-mail address, you are the one whose time is taken up deleting/sorting the spam, you are the one whose ISP fees go up if they have to buy more disk space or bandwidth to deal with all the spam they get for all their customers. This is a cost borne by the consumer, in other words, not the advertiser.
Second, spam is almost always a violation of an Acceptable Use Policy for the spammer's ISP. ISPs don't like dealing with spam any more than recipients, especially because the spammer is more than likely using a throwaway account and will not be a continuing customer. This single short-time customer might be the source of 75% of the administrative work for the ISP during this period.
Third, spammers rarely use their own paid-for accounts, but find an open SMTP relay server to send their mail through. When they do this, there are two effects: theft of service and denial of service. The theft occurs because they have no contractual relationship with the manager of the relay server, yet they make the relay do all the work (expanding a CC list to hundreds of destination servers, for example), stealing the bandwidth, server disk space, server uptime, sysadmin labor, and other resources of the hapless victim. Second, the bandwidth and disk space taken up by the spammer are denied to the server owner, and if the server crashes under the weight of spam, the server owner's people have no mail server to use. Hence, theft of service AND denial of service.
While some people use "spam" generically to account for all kinds of unwanted e-mail, technically it refers first of all to unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail.
The kinds of solicited mail you speak of (forgetting to uncheck that "notify me of new products" box, for instance) are easily demonstrated by legitimate operations (who probably have to do it periodically). This kind of harassment is another nasty denial-of-service secondary effect of spammers: upstanding customers get raked over the coals for no good reason. Anyway, anybody who gets that kind of mail deserves it. But a legitimate bulk e-mail is also easy to unsubscribe from.
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
If junk email offered useful services with legitimate terms, I wouldn't mind it so much.
..." (They hope that the magic word 'opt-in' will get me off their backs.)
I throw out most of my junk postal email, but every now and then I get good coupons for pizza or free samples of interesting stuff, and the rest of my junk postal email is relatively innocent and irrelevant to me, so I don't have much of a problem with the amount of junk postal email I get. (I'll make an exception for the junk mail that tries to look more important than it really is, such as magazine subscription ads that look like invoices, or credit-card applications that try to look like they've annotated by hand or that come with faux newspaper clippings. And every time my bank sends me a letter stamped 'Important: Account Information Enclosed,' I know to ignore it.)
But I have two serious problems with junk email:
(1) I have NEVER received junk email that's even remotely useful to me; moreover, I don't think I've ever gotten any junk email that even looks legitimate. All of it looks like too-good-to-be-true deals by fly-by-night companies that will be all to glad to take your money and skip town overnight with it. The services themselves are even shady -- the majority of my junk email is for things like "get your neighbor's credit history!" or "buy now and get a list of free XXX web site passwords!" or "buy this list of email addresses for advertising; it's been pre-screened!" or "I tried this pyramid scheme, and it REALLY WORKS!"
(2) What's worse, the spammers lie blatantly about the nature of their spam. For example:
"Hey Dave, here's more info about that great real-estate program I was telling you about last night! Say hi to Margaret for me!" (Making it look like I'm the accidental beneficiary of some choice information.)
"This email is NOT SPAM. You are receiving this email because you have contacted us or one of our subsidiary companies in the past." (I get this sort of spam sent to the email address in my InterNIC domain record, which I've never actually used to send anything.)
"You are on our OPT-IN marketing list. If you would like to be removed, please opt into the removal process by sending your email address to
"Make money fast! This is NOT a pyramid scheme!" (That's the best tipoff that it is.)
"A prime-time television special tried our multi-level marketing scheme, and not only did it bring them sixty thousand dollars in two days, but they also discovered that there are absolutely no laws against it!" (Note that they never mention what TV show they're talking about.)
All in all, it's not the amount of spam that bothers me so much (although I would like to get rid of it entirely, and I support CAUCE). It's the shady, thieving nature of the stuff that really irks me. For every million spam emails that these crooks send out, they're going to find at least a few dozen people who really believe that they can earn $50,000 a month by stuffing envelopes at home, and these people will gladly kiss $70 from their own pockets goodbye.
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Think about it. If you're in the paper-based junk mail business, you would
not want those pesky email-based spammers to be eating into your customer
base. IBLI is a natural enemy of spammers, and would probably be happy to
sponsor an anti-spam effort.
There's an additional reason to sign up- being a free user of spamcop myself, I know that the site prioritizes paying users higher for processes. So if you're a free user you can keep using it (and contributing to the lists of hosts and their spamcounts), but if things are busy you'll be asked to try again later, all processes are busy. That's cool :)
I'm not losing a word about that comment's moderation to 4, Insightful.
Spam is commercial soliciatation or advertising. It has nothing to do with free speech advertising has always, and rightly so, had many restrictions. The problem is that there isn't enough restrictions for spam right now.
Most people who post about *spam* (both solicited email and non solicited email) have the attitude that advertisements in the email form are somewhere being near breaking one of the 10 commandments. They argue with the appearance that what these advertisers are doing is morally wrong. While they don't intend to sound as such, that's the way most come across.
Spammers are violating one of the 10 commandments, should you happen to have the christian worldview. Spammers are STEALING my bandwidth, disk space, and time, to get their message across to me. I get NOTHING from them for that privledge.
I believe that some of the tactics that email marketers use is blatantly abusive of the end user, but most are not. Have you considered suing slashdot, or perhaps andover for compensation for the bandwidth that it took to download the banner ad at the top of the page you're seeing now? if not...why? you didn't ask for the banner ad. It's a blantant infringement of your rights as an internet user.
If Slashdot used my email address to send me ads without my permission, and sold that address to others, I would gladly sue Andover.
Your comparison between advertising graphics, and emails, is invalid. When I download an ad, I am making an active effort, to make a connection to slashdot.org's server, to download the ad. When I receive an email, though, that was something *sent* to me by the advertiser, without my knowledge or consent.
Besides, I have slashdot's ad server in my junkbuster block list, and I browse without images anyway!
Most people who are violently against any type of advertisement in their email are the same who don't realize the way economics work. Nothing is for free. Even slashdot isn't free. The price you pay for the content is the banner ad at the top of the page. I am willing to dispense a little of my time, or my ever so precious bandwidth to support sites like slashdot. These guys have to make a living somehow. And to keep the site free to us (at least monetarily speaking) is to sell some of their space to advertisers. Depending on the needs of the site, company, or what have you, and the service it produces. It may be necessary to ask you if you want to recieve some other ads in the mail. If you don't...you get to click a button that says you don't want it. But for people to criticize a practice that keeps alot of the things i like free, is just, ill informed.
Why don't you stick to the issue at hand, unsolicited emails? Arguing about advertising in general is off the topic. I never said anything against ads in general; only against unsolicited emailings.
Besided, what are those emails funding, pray tell, that I am using? Making money fast? Take CmdrTaco's example: ads for toner, when he doesn't even have a printer. Or the ads I always get, offering to "give my web site credit card accepting ability". What is that funding, that I am enjoying?
Users don't like spam, and ISPs definatly don't like the waste of resources, why can't someone write a mailer that checks for mass amounts of identical mail? If over 100 users are on some Bcc list or if the same piece of mail keeps going through the system then shut it down. Make it suspend their account and inform the administrator.
If ISPs did this the only ISPs sending spam will be ones that approve of it and we could simply collect their domain names and put them on blocks and killfiles.
I don't see how we're not saying the same thing.
However, the USPS cannot 'choose' to deny delivery of "objectionable" bulk mail, per cases like Bol ger v. Youngs Drugs Prods. (1983)
Exactly. The government (i.e., USPS) is not, and should not be, allowed to pick and choose what's "best" for the recipients to recieve (excepting that weird case)
I as a private recipient can ban junk mail from my mailbox, by filing a form with the USPS.
Indeed. You somehow assumed that I was against the right for an individual to "opt out". Clearly an individual should be able to choose to opt out of unsolicited mail. But the point is that the government should not make that choice for individuals without their consent.
In short, such spam is useless to everyone, the sender, the potential customer, and the millions of 'innocent victims'.
That's an opinion, not a fact. It's up to each individual to decide whether they want to receive unsolicited communications.
Bottom line, I am fully capable of making these decisions without the government's -- or your -- help.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
fluxrad said: I believe that some of the tactics that email marketers use is blatantly abusive of the end user, but most are not. Have you considered suing slashdot, or perhaps andover for compensation for the bandwidth that it took to download the banner ad at the top of the page you're seeing now? if not...why? you didn't ask for the banner ad. It's a blantant infringement of your rights as an internet user. Well, let's take a look at what you're saying here and do a little comparison. I agree, the tactics used by spammers are very abusive of the end user. Most of these cretins fake email addresses, masquerade behind inaccurate and/or forged headers and rarely, if ever, contain any reference to a working address where you might contact them and get your name off the list. Would you allow some masked guy to walk up on your porch and stuff a bag of shit in your mailbox? If it were me, I'd be calling the cops. Let's compare the banner ad to the spam crap in my mailbox. The ad occupies space on a page that I clicked on to read. If there's a 5k banner at the top of something interesting to read, I really don't give a rat's ass. I can easily ignore all the superfluous stuff on the page, including links to related sites, the author's email address, etc, so what's so tough about a banner ad? Now, let's look at UCE. I'm sorting through mail that I usually either receive from friends I know and love or mail from lists I've actively subscribed to. At least three out of the 10-25 messages I receive in a day is UCE. It has no use to me whatsoever. I didn't request it, I don't care for it, and in most cases there's not even a real product associated with it that any intelligent adult would have any use for. I could filter it. I could simply delete it. Or I could go to the source and say, "Stop it." Like the cretin I referred to in the first paragraph, I should be able to have some solution to keep the masked asshole off my doorstep. Either give me a working opt-out process that would keep *all* unsolicted commercial email out of my inbox or make it a crime to stuff the shit in my box.
Why would I want to stop those informative e-mails? Just yesterday I was informed that I may have already won a free cruise. And another message (which assured me it was not a pyramid scheme by the way) made me aware of the fact that I could easily make $50000 a month IN MY OWN HOME! I have also been made aware of the fact that there are lots of hot teenage women who would love to be with me. I mean honestly...this so called spam is the only hope I had left. I thought I was a luckless geek making $8.00 an hour who hates his job and can't wait to graduate from college just to get a boring also underpaying job and I would probably never get to go on a cruise. Just some thoughts.
My Home: Apartment6
Not only will their server be slashdotted, but the enormous demand for anti-spam tactics will likely get them "spamdotted" as well. I can only imagine the response come monday when the techies get to work and get their right-click *forward* fingers goin'.
There appear to be only 4 sections to the bill, so reference to "section 101 para (e)(1)(a)" is completely bogus. For what it's worth, the bill is primarily concerned with "training program grants" and related matters.
S.1618 appeared in 1998, and subesquently died in the House. BYKTA.
"Forward them your spam, and they will prosecute the spammers for you, giving you time to do other things" ...while they get a few bucks from the lawsuit
I was just thinking - they must have a really good deal going with their lawyer!
Spam, per se, is not illegal. Irritating, but not illegal. I think the recent federal law only requires that they give you a method of opting out.
Also, I think a lot of people need to think through the concept of "banning spam". There are significant free speech issues involved here. If the federal government restricts people's rights to send communications to private individuals, that is the "slippery slope" to the government controlling how individuals communicate.
Just for the record, I think the federal law should require unsolicited e-mails to include an identifier in the subject like "unsolicited" or something.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Error Occurred While Processing Request
Error Diagnostic Information
WaitNamedPipe returned FALSE. Windows NT error number 121 occurred.
Hum. Can we trust such a buggy NT-based service to provide secure spam recycling services?
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
-- Faré @ TUNES.org
Reflection & Cybernet
Yes, I sit on CAUCE's Board of Directors, BTW, and it irritates us to no end when people like you jump to conclusions without bothering to ask us our side of the story.
I've been using spamcop.net for a long time now, all you do is paste the e-mail in their form and it tracks it then looks up the abuse records. It's nifty, whenever I get spam I use it and get the spammers account terminated
I used to get that Toner Spam from Benchmark Industries about once a week. The interesting part was that they didn't BCC the email list. This was nice because you could pretty easily figure out where they got the list from (obviously it was also bad because any of those other people on the list could use it for their own spamming purposes.)
Anyway, after reporting them to spamcop for months and filing complaints against them with the Better Business Bureau (both good resources for this) I decided to actually look at the email. At the bottom they included two different 1-800 numbers for customer support and to remove your name from their list.
Now, obviously I'm not going to tell them which email is active, because they'll just send me more, so I had my computer call them up over and over and over and over again leaving long messages (at their expenses, thank you 1-800) telling them to remove all email addresses from my school (everyone on their list was from my university). They were never there in person, always had a machine answer the phone, but I think they eventually got fed up with paying the 1-800 bill and eventually stopped sending me spam.
It was some work, but it eventually got rid of them. So remember, first use spamcop, second use BBB, third spam them back... always check for that 1-800.
--
RumorsDaily
If you're really interested in the 'legal bits',
check out http://thomas.loc.gov
It's got a search engine that can help track down the text and status of bills.
An interesting clause of s.1618 would have made it a 'civil' offence to send spam without putting a physical address and telephone number at the top of the spam, so the message probably wasn't in compliance in the first place. (see Title III section 301)
That said, s.1618 of the 105th congress never made it into law, so it doesn't matter anyway.
HR.4176 never even passed the house of representatives, so you can safely ignore that reference.
A reference to a real federal law should be of the form <number> USC <number>, or refer to some section of the U.S. Code (of law).
Claiming compliance to a bill that hasn't even passed congress, much less been signed by the President, is meaningless drivel, and a waste of bits.
Rule number 1: Spammers lie.
The 105th Congress' H.R. 4176 is an anti-jamming, anti-spamming, anti-slamming thing. It never made it out of the House of Reps. See thomas.loc.gov, and remember to go to the 'previous congress' search area.
The current Congress' H.R. 4176 is the Information Technology Act of 2000.
Strange, but apparently true.
they have a section that discusses current UCE ligislation being considered. anyone know why we just dont revise the 'unsolicited fax' laws to apply to email as well? it's practically the same thing, specially if you recieve your email with PPP over a phone line.
Yes, you'd think there'd be a story on slashdot. But that's not the case. Read this and see how wrong you are. There was a DDoS.
TITLE 47 - TELEGRAPHS, TELEPHONES, AND RADIOTELEGRAPHS
CHAPTER 5 - WIRE OR RADIO COMMUNICATION
SUBCHAPTER II - COMMON CARRIERS
Part I - Common Carrier Regulation
Sec. 227. Restrictions on use of telephone equipment
(a) Definitions
As used in this section -
(2) The term ''telephone facsimile machine'' means equipment which has the capacity
(A) to transcribe text or images, or both, from paper into an electronic signal and to transmit that signal over a regular telephone line, or
(B) to transcribe text or images (or both) from an electronic signal received over a regular telephone line onto paper.
So *that* definition checks out, anyway. Let's see what the law prohibits:
(b) Restrictions on use of automated telephone equipment
(1) Prohibitions
It shall be unlawful for any person within the United States -
[...]
(C) to use any telephone facsimile machine, computer, or other device to send an unsolicited advertisement to a telephone facsimile machine;
Now, I'm sorry for the ugliness (can we please have the preformatted text tag back? Pretty please?) but you can check for yourself that this is indeed the proper nested reference.
Good news:
1) a computer that has a printer (and modem) is a 'telephone facsimile machine'
2) Spammers *can't* use a computer to send spam to my 'telephone facsimile machine'
Bad news:
If you back up a couple of nested levels, you see items like
So yes, if the spammer is using a dial-in to the internet, they are surely breaking the law. This probably applies to a lot of small-timers (a good chunk of the more clueless spams, but not necessarily a large percentage of total spam)
Unfortunately, if the spammer has a network link, instead of a dial-up account then the courts may not see this as an appropriate law to apply. You really can't blame them -- the word "telephone" could hardly be more prominent. As far as deciding what constitutes a telephone -- Three words: Technology. Judges. Barf.
But what if you use a dial-up ISP? Well, it could easily be argued that *he* didn't send the spam over the phone line, *you* did. He had no idea that you would choose to access your inbox via telephone. He addressed the e-mail to your inbox. [analogy: if someone mails you an advertisement, and you tell your secretary to fax your to the branch office where you're working this week... then YOU faxed the advertisement, not the advertiser.]
I suspect your case would be only slightly stronger if your entire domain was connected to the internet via modem or DSL. They could argue "lack of intent" and "unusual circumstances" (or similar concepts). You could argue "reckless disregard" or (or similar concepts). It's a pissing match.
That's why I chose to argue (elsewhere in this thread) from 'postal' mail principles, rather than telephone. Since I made that post, I actually found a substantial body of law supporting an anti-spam position. It turns out that we have far more (court approved) anti-junk mail power than we generally use (because it's too inconvenient as a practical matter). However, it's great precedent, and in the e-mail arena, unlike snail mail the whole process can be automated.
_____________
If you can go to bed, knowing you did a valuable thing today, you're very lucky. If you can't... it's not bedtime
We would greatly appreciate your registration and feedback about our program.Joining ChooseYourMail is absolutely free and can be stopped at any time.
This sound like the way I got on so many spam-lists to start with..
-
air and light and time and space
Okay, so lets assume that spamrecycle.com is the real address. Check this out:
"The Spam Recycling Center also makes your Spam available to software companies to improve their spam filter products."
Now that to me just seems a little wierd. I mean, they make their money from spam, so is it entirely in their interests to stamp it out?
I think the most basic test you can apply as to whether spam should be allowed is this: what would happen if everyone did it?
There must be millions of businesses with email access and if they all spammed a million addresses once per week, the net would grind to a halt.
No-one would be able to use email because rather than just looking through a few dozen spams each day, we'd have to sort genuine emails from thousands of messages.
Spamming is an antisocial act and should be outlawed. And I don't think any free speech ideal should be attached to it either; people should have the right to free speech, but I should have the right not to listen.
Although I suppose you're just a troll.
This company does not prosecute your spam, they only send it to your state representative. They also have an extensive list of spam that they want to to sign up to receive!!!
A (major, I'm guessing) partner in this is Choose Your Mail . com, which let you decide what spam to get. Yeah right...
I'm not going to post that i love getting spam in my email. Unsolicited email is a pain in the ass...but not all of the ads i get in my mail box are what i would classify as "spam"
I know of alot of people who complain about getting "spam" in their email box from some company they bought something from, but either checked, or didn't think to uncheck that nice little box that says "notify me of other products." Fly by night email advertisers who gain gobs of email addresses by illegal means, or who illegaly use properly obtained email addresses should be prosecuted. But there *ARE* email marketing firms who are trying to do the right thing. They don't over pressure their "customers", and they don't try to screw people in the name of the almighty buck...*cough*double-click*cough*
While the majority of what just about every slashdot reader gets is spam (because, while many appear to have a preoccupation with hot grits, they are vastly more internet savvy than the general populous), most people are just not internet-wise enough to know where/where not to click to recieve/not recieve targeted email. I'm afraid that this is going to put alot of good people out of work for no reason but to get rid of a couple of emails in your inbox that you opted to recieve.
is it hot in here? i think i'm about to get flamed.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I know how the service I'm using, SpamCop, makes money.
There's a service (of which I'm a satisfied customer) called SpamCop, that parses spam headers (including addresses hidden in JavaScript, decimal IP's, etc.) for you and makes it painless to report spam. Sites hosted by legitimate ISP's referred to in a spam to me have a life expectancy measurable in minutes from the time I receive the spam. There are both metered subscriptions and a free (with a 4 second JavaScript countdown nag) one available.
<humor>BTW, spamrecycle.com has an anti-spam petition . I hope it doesn't involve forwarding the petition to ten friends, who will forward it to ten more, and . . . </humor>
I would not be at all suprised if this website was run by the spammers, to collect legit e-mail addresses. Does anyone know anything about the background of the operators of this site?
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Think about it, all you want is to get rid of spam, I personally don't care whether I get money from the idiot who sends me printer-toner spam, I just want him to stop.
This way, they litigate the guy, he'll settles out of court 99.99% of the time, so it won't burden the justice system, he quits spamming, and pays them some money.
They stop spammers and make money, in another light, they make money providing a service.
Isn't that what Capitalism is all about?
Jordan Bettis
``Wherever you go, there's another stupid sigfile quote.''