Slashdot Mirror
Handling Spam from Large Commercial Entities?
"It was at this point that principle kicked in. It's MY e-mail account. I wanted Amazon to stop mailing me information about whatever special they were advertising. Seeing no easy way to contact them electronically, I picked up the phone and gave them a call. Three operators and getting hung up on once later, I was told that Amazon.com would not stop sending me their spam, because I was not the Amazon.com account holder.
This brings up a new twist on spam, privacy, and recourse to be taken. It is in fact my e-mail account, paid for by me, and Amazon tells me I have no control over what I may receive via it. I could in fact notify my ISP to block incoming mail from Amazon, but I know people who work there and may actually wish to receive mail from them. There doesn't seem to be any 'complaints@amazon.com' alias available on their site. What action can be taken in this instance?
As it turned out, I forked over the phone to my wife, who in the process of 'modifying' her account information, wound up hunting through her wallet to find those last five digits on her credit card, which sounds more dubious than entering them into a text field on a website.
There are many other variables which might have factored into this: What if my wife had died since last Christmas? What if she had left me in that time? (more probable ;-) Perhaps she had canceled the credit card in question.
In any case, I find it completely unacceptable that I as owner of an e-mail account could not easily get an e-commerce provider to stop sending me e-mail. What courses of action are available for this problem? Are there any precedents for this?"
And the never-ending problem of spam continues... You would think that after all of the debates, the new laws, and filters that spam would be less of a problem, yet now we have legitimate commercial entities able to fill your electronic in-boxes and in certain situations like the one above, you may not be able to do anything about it. Do any of you out there have ideas on any solutions?
Hmm. It only takes 1-Click to buy something, but a bunch of personal information to get of their mailing list...
I'm sure I'll be lambasted for saying this, but this is about the stupidest Ask Slashdot I have ever seen. If you are going to give your credit card number to a company which you know they will have on file, you better be damn sure you don't forget the password.
Would you rather have someone crack your e-mail address password and have them realize all they have to do is go to amazon and click a few buttons and they'll have access to your amazon account as well?
Anyway, if it bothers you that much, and you can't even go through the trouble to get you credit card out to verify that this is your account, all of amazon's mass e-mails are sent from specific e-mail addresses from amazon.com, such as history-editor@amazon.com or alerts@amazon.com, and you can filter out those specific addresses really easily in most modern mail programs.
This all leads me to the conclusion that you are a troll.
"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." --Saul Belloe
Or a better solution which tempts me: Get your own domain, and create a new address for every company that requests one (e.g. amazon@mydomain.net). Then use mail aliases to decide if the company gets to send mail to your account or to
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
They are waiting for their one-click SPAM removal patent application to be confirmed. If they're not careful with such innovation, someone might steal it and use it to undermine their entire operation!
- Twi
I don't know about the links in the e-mail, but if you go to Amazon.com and scroll to the bottom you'll find a Privacy Notice link.
Click on it, and on the resulting page you find a Customer Communication Preferences link.
Click on it, type your e-mail, select the forgotten password option and hit continue.
This will e-mail the password. Then update your e-mail preferences using the same two starting links.
I don't seem to have your problem?
IMHO Amazon.com has done a reasonable job of responding to the privacy and spam concerns of their customers. YMMV
Hi!
Set up a free account with excite mail and use that for everything else. When it gets too spam-ridden, cancel it. Set up a new one.
I had 7 email accounts and usually got about 5 spams a day on some of them. I canceled those acounts, set up a new account which NO ONE but my friends/family gets, and set up an account at Excite (which is a nice one).
Email's cheap enough (free) that you can afford to set up a new one.
On the other hand, if you're already bombarded by spam, that is a problem.
Be ot or bot ne ot, taht is the nestquoi.
Sort of a similar story. Once a few years ago I bought my wife a book from Amazon and have since received email from them at various points. I finally decided I no longer wanted it and looked for an easy way to "opt-out." Just as stated, you seemingly had to jump hoops if you didn't know your password (I didn't, I had ordered a long time ago). I wasn't looking forward to calling them and wasting more time, so I tried the obvious. I simply replied and put "unsubscribe" as the subject line. They sent me a confimation email within a day stating I had been removed and I haven't received another email from them since. Sometimes the simplest solution really is the best.
For example, my Yahoo member account has the word "yahoo" encrypted in the email address. The email address kiwi-nody4la is the word "sldot" (short for `slashdot') encrypted by the program.
This program also has support for encrypting time stamps (email addresses that time out), having a different encryption code for messages posted to Usenet, and encrypting the IP someone views a web page from.
The program is completely free, being under the public domain. Source can be found here:
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
I've had great results with my method for handling spam - I use a great little Windows utility called Bounce Spam which sends an email to the spammer looking very much like a message from the server indicating that the message couldn't be delivered. I don't know if a similar utility exists for Linux but I wouldn't be surprised to find one.
Dead email addresses are less than useless to spammers - making them think yours is dead is the fastest way to get off their mailing lists.
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
Ironfist.cmg is whining without thinking, and Slashdot has no discernably legitimate reason to post this story:
Making a long story, shorter: it wasn't that simple. It should have been, but it turned out to be much worse.
In my experience, most things on Amazon are much easier and more straightforward. Create and cancel an order on Amazon - *very* easy. Now try the same thing with buy.com, outpost.com, or others - and good luck, because you simply can't do it through their web interfaces. The convenience of one-click (which I personally love) requires Amazon to be a bit more sure of who you are before sending out a password - passwords are for security after all, and your inability to manage your authentication credentials is hardly their fault.
It was at this point that principle kicked in. It's MY e-mail account.
Perhaps you should have considered this before letting someone else use your account. You hardly have cause to gripe here, as the situation is entirely of your own making...
This brings up a new twist on spam, privacy, and recourse to be taken. It is in fact my e-mail account, paid for by me, and Amazon tells me I have no control over what I may receive via it.
Again, you let your wife use it, and she, who was Amazon's customer, not you, selected the "let me know about things at Amazon" option. If this ticks you off, it's something you should discuss with your wife, not Amazon, as you aren't even a customer...
And the never-ending problem of spam continues...
Not really, your own post makes it clear that this was resolved with Amazon over the phone. This entire piece seems to be just an excuse to accuse Amazon of spamming, which they're clearly not doing here.
You may not like getting this mail, but what you've described is NOT spam. Not by a long shot.
And if the problem is resolved, just what was you motive for this posting? (and Slashdot's motive for selecting it for publication?) This whole thing looks like a very badly disguised attempt to villify Amazon on unjust grounds...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I dont have time to check, but perhaps MAPS can threaten to add them. Last that I heard, the main requirement is that the spammer wont stop even after being asked. http://maps.vix.com/rbl/reporting.html talks about how to report spammers. Give it a shot, I'm sure that they'd be in trouble to get blackholed. heh. Of course, I'm also sure that MAPS doesnt wana get sued again :)
Typical creationist pab, and I see it all the time. Just because something exists in nature doesn't mean it was necessarily placed there by an intelligent and omnipotent Creator. It goes back to Dawkins and the watchmaker -- complexity will manifest itself when given sufficient time and enough evolutionary pressure.
Look, the internet is going on thirty years old today. Do you have any idea how many doublings of Moore's law that is? Is it really that hard to believe that somewhere in there, when all those transistors got packed in really tight in warm dark quarters, they remained completely chaste? Is it so inconceivable that the result of just one of these matings could've produced the primordial ancestor of the modern internet filter?
The universe is an exciting enough place as it is. We don't have resort to unsubstantiated but entrenched rumors about divine intervention in these strictly mortal affairs.
-- Anne Marie