Spam Ordeal

Geoffrey Huntley writes: "I was sent this URL the other day by a friend. It's a Web page detailing the efforts, Kane Bullen went through to get himself removed from a unsolicited mailing list, and ends up making a profit from it." Cute.

Comments

I've seem similar

[crovax]

Take a web page and post your e-mail with a disclamer saying something like "Any person(s) who send(s) unsolicited commercial e-mail [spam] to this address will be subject to a fine of X dollars" where X is the smallest dollar ammount allowed in small claims court in your area.
As long as that is the only place your e-mail is published it should work.
I've heard of people getting $300 or $400 after spending an hour in court.

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Re:I've seem similar

[defective]

I get frustrated when people include my email address in a long list of TO or CC addresses. Then I recieve a lot of Reply to All emails that I have no interest in. To me, this is just as bad as spam. It takes the same amount of resources for me to deal with it.

Any suggestions on how to prevent friends from distributing your email address like this?

Re:I've seem similar

[crovax]

uuh... yeah.

1. Don't give your friends your email.

2. Get a new e-mail address and repeat 1.

3. install filters in your e-mail client

4. Or you could try something like what Mr. Huntley did.

I had a simillar problem but it was the same people over and over. eventually after many many e-mails begging them to stop they did. Though I doubt asking will work for you at this point.

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Re:I've seem similar

[defective]

1) If I can't give me friends my email address then what's the point of having email?

2) I have a domain, unlimited email address, but I have to pick one for my reply-to address.

3) I don't want to filter my friends, and it's a pain in the ass to filter my friends' friends... this shouldn't happen in the first place.

4) I like this idea :)

Bad HTML

[SEWilco]

Gee, too bad his feedback form at the bottom of the page doesn't work with my Netscape...

Not such a great victory

[dmuth]

IMHO, this isn't such a great victory for the anti-spam community. Rather, I think this is a case of a business wanting to pay the person money up front (think "settlement"), as opposed to having to fight a lawsuit at some point in the future. (Not that there would be much basis for one, but they might not know that...)

I think of it as tripping and falling on the sidewalk in front of a business - If you bitch to the business owner, he'll probally pay you $n, where n is two digits, to replace your torn pants, as opposed to having n be 4 or 5 digits if he doesn't do anything and you decide to sue him for negligence.

Re:Not such a great victory

[nz_mincemeat]

However if more people do this, then the increase of administrative costs and "settlement" money will increase the price of spam to such an extent as to make the practise unprofitable. Remembering that the main allure of spamming is its low marginal cost. Litigation is not as effective as what it appears to be. After all, how long does it take until some spammer gets away on a technicality and set a bad legal precedent?

So....

[MrScience]

Does he get another check now that they sent him another letter (albiet with a check inside)? :-)

Very Bad HTML

[Keith_Beef]

Well, I have had similar ideas about charging a "processing fee"... but most of the crap I receive doesn't come from reputable companies like the publisher of the investment magazine seems to be.

Apart from that, young Kane ought to read up on HTML a bit more, and think about closing the table... the browser won't render the table rows and cells until it encounters the </table> tag.

Fake

[suky]

This was just on kuro5hin.org a short time ago, and it appears to be a fraud.