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Legal Recources Against Above-Board Spamming?

Posted by Cliff on from the hitting-the-canned-meat-in-the-budget dept.

brandyn asks: "Marketshare Recovery is apparently selling my e-mail address to companies and telling them I am an "opt-in" customer, as if somehow opting in for notifications from one company is a blank check written to every spammer in the world. More, the company who spammed me claims M.R. told them I opted-in while making an online purchase within the last six months. In truth, I never "opt-in" for e-mail, and the only online purchase I've made in the last couple of years used a different address entirely. So in the case of my address, they're almost certainly fraudulently representing it to the companies who are purchasing it from them, ultimately at my expense. What can I do to recover that expense from them and/or prevent them from continuing to cost others?"

1 of 23 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hit 'D'. by dubl-u · · Score: 3
    I learnt that the only thing to do was to hit 'D'. Call me a pessimist or a fatalist or whatever, but it really is the only solution.

    This may work when spam is 10% of your mail. Is it a good solution when it's 50%? How about 90% of your mail?

    I don't know about you folks, but about 90% of my paper mail is garbage (sorry, I mean "special offers"). Spam is orders of magnitude cheaper per recipient than snail mail, so there's no reason to expect the spammers to stop at 90%. And once your mailbox is 99% trash, you'llstart getting 2 MB Flash advertisements in your inbox from marketroid who want to "cut through the clutter" that they themselves created.

    The truth is that there is plenty you can do:
    • Never buy from it - In getting rid of roaches, rule #1 is to remove their food source. Same thing here. Spammers only spam because they think it will profit them.
    • Report it - I use SpamCop; it does 95% of the work.
    • Automatically reject it - Tell your MTA to make use of the spammer blacklists at MAPS and elsewhere.
    • Tell your friends - Most people don't realize that spammers inflate ISP fees and reduce service quality by clogging servers with garbage. Educate them!
    • Tell your legislators - Some countries and US states have already outlawed spam. To help make this universal, you have to let your legal reps know how you feel. Check out The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email.
    • Don't do business with spamhausen - Especially if you are a network admin, don't do businesses with companies that profit from spam. Check out spamhaus.org and spamsites.org for details. And make sure to let the sales droids know why you won't buy from 'em!
    This is a problem that we will all have to deal with eventually. We should do it now while the problem is only costing us 10 billion dollars a year, up from approximately zero a decade ago.