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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"?
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."
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)
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!}
was that meant to be www.spamrecycle.com? .org doesn't exist.
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.
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!}
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!
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?
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.
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).
However, it won't stand slashdotting- lately nonpaying subscribers have often been unable to use the site because paying subscribers get higher priorities for running processes. Part of me is sad when this happens and the other part is delighted :) go spamcop!
Also, does anyone know anything about this 'chooseyourmail.com' (in cooperation with 'F.R.E.E' and "C.A.U.C.E")? spamcop defaults to cooperating with them, but I'm still nervous of it. It claims several entirely dumb and redundant things (turn your spam into steak indeed! Have you no clue of my real motivations) but also claims to forward to 'the federal authorities'. Is that true or is it a lie or a hype?
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
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?
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 :)
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.
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
"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.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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 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.
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RumorsDaily
It's not akin to snail-junk-mail at all. For every peice of junkmail that arrives in your physical mailbox, they have paid the post office a considerable amount to deliver it. You don't own your mailbox, the post office does; so start to end, the person who is junkmailing you is paying (a not inconsideable amount) to the postoffice for the privelidge of using the system. You are not paying anything. With spam, the person who pays for the bandwidth to your mailbox is YOU - and it's not theoretical - ISP's pay for every byte that goes in and out of their network, and they get reimbursed for that from the money you are paying for your account. When someone spams, you foot the bill, and they don't pay anything. It's theft, plain and simple.
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.
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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..
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air and light and time and space
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>