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Forced Into Spamming By Your Employer?
SOS asks: "My employer has asked me to setup a 'SPAM super boxen' in which all it does all day is spew out spam. We have setup a bogus domain, and brought in several broadband internet connections from several ISPs in which to do this nasty deed from. I have insisted at the very least that we actually do setup a system in which people can take there name off the list by simply replying to the spam email. But I would rather not do this at all, while still being employed by this company. The impression management is under is that 'spam works'. Its very simple, they spend $2000 for a server and internet connection, have there system admin spend a few hours setting it up, and if they only gain 5 clients from 50,000 emails, it will be well worth it. If one ISP shuts us down, we switch to another one the same day. What argument can I use to somehow dislodge this idea from there head, and possibly implant something a little more sensible, while staying employed?" I always liken SPAM to telemarketers. Everyone hates being associated with telemarketers. However if that trick doesn't work and the legalese surrounding SPAM isn't enough of an argument against it, what other arguments are likely to gain the attention of your neighborhood PHB?
Posted by skunkeh:
:o)
We've got an anti-spam hacker in our building. He tells long technical jokes about the security on spam relay machines that he's "investigated" - I don't understand them but they make the other techies laugh...
Someone give that man a medal
I'd say drop a line to the RSS or RBL people and the regular spam buster houses and tell them what is going to happen. Or at least tell maybe tell us what the domains are or the subjects of the spams are going to be so we can add them to our own procmailrc files. :)
Just send out a few hundred set up so that replies come back to your boss or superior. After seeing what people think of spam, they will most likely drop it. The problem with refusing or quiting, is that if they think it is a good idea, they will try to find someone else to set it up. You have the opportunity to show them what a bad idea it is.
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
Spam is illegal in many jurisdictions. People have been prosecuted. Unless you have a reliable system to avoid sending spam to people in those jurisdictions -- and I'm certain you don't -- you're going to break the law.
Life's too short to work for jerks and criminals. You've got skills, and despite what everyone says, your skills are still marketable. Take advantage of that, and trade up to a better job.
Goodness.
Imagine what would happen if *everyone* had your attitude.
We'd have space shuttles blowing up, all because someone didn't have the cojones to fink-out the boos. Or child slave labour manufacturing negligees for rich bitches. Or toxic spills devastating entire ecosystems, beyond all repair.
Oh... wait. It seems everyone *does* have your attitude.
Except, perhaps, the few people who have put their lives on the line to stop their employers from doing the illegal and immoral. Karen Silkwood, f'rinstance.
But, then, people with strong moral fiber are surely a world apart from people like you.
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Bloody hell, I wish Slashdot had an edit feature.
Strike the last line; I re-read your post, and your first point somewhat ameliorates what you said in the second point. Not that your second point is really all that terrific: blindly doing what the boss says does yourself and your boss a disservice.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
The KKK does not have a right to march in my living room. Operation Rescue does not have a right to call my phone number. Spammers do not have a right to contact my SMTP server.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I think he is trying to find a way to help his employer figure out that spamming doesn't fit with their morals and ethics. If he finds out he is wrong in that assumption, then your statement is valid.
In this case you must show him how his money is going into a black hole by spamming. Find case studies and figure out the ROI for such an operation. If it turns out that spamming does actually have a decent ROI then...
Show him how the ill will generated by the spamming is losing him money. In particular you must show that he is losing more money than he is making.
If both those fail, then maybe he *should* be in the spam business.
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.. really easy.
1) Do you think you can change the attitude of the company? Only you would know this. If you feel it's something you can educate people about, by all means try.
2) Don't forget that it's not your company; you are an employee, and it's their way or the highway. You can indicate to them that you will not do this, and that if that means you lose your job, that's fine. Or you can simply say 'no' and quit. That's your call.
3) You can do the job you are being paid to do. Spam is not illegal where you are? Your employer is paying for their bandwidth? I hate spam as much as the next guy... but only you can decide how far to go to protect what you think is right.
You can do some good before you leave. Set up their super spam boxen to flood the company's internal e-mail system.
Go down in a blaze of glory, I always say.
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Pretend there is some witty statement here.
If you're in any sort of reputable business the cost of spamming is not just a server, bandwidth and admin time.
The damage done to the reputation of the company, and the hassle from the annoyed recipients will cost you far more. If you're selling something they will have SOME way to get a hold of you.
If that doesn't convince them, carefully read Death March by Ed Yourdon this weekend.
I'm in the same boat. My employer actually does b2b spam. Their clients contract us to do web-based guest satisfaction surveys, and we have to spam our clients' customer lists to ask for them to fill out a survey. At least we're only spamming customers, but it's still heartbreaking.
I'm in a worse position, though, because we're actually getting paid to do it. No matter how much I complain, it still brings money directly in the door, and it's not like I can bite the hand that feeds me.
Spam really is a moneymaker, just like snail mail spam is, and in these dark days of dot-com deadpools, you can't afford to pick your customers. I can't exactly point at any other profitable web-based business and say, "See, this is how you're supposed to do it."
What's your damage, Heather?
Perhaps hiring a hit is your only alternative? :)
I value my job, and I was asked to do something similar.
I told my boss in no uncertain terms "NO!".
And (after a very long discussion,) he conceded.. he said that he thought that I was wrong, but if I felt that strongly about it, then he'd concede.
It's not impossible - you just have to be adamant.
Spam is a behavior that can include speech, but forbidding is not a violation of freedom of speech.
Consider your example: KKK marches. The KKK is allowed to ask for permits to parade just like anybody else. And the government can't deny them the permit just because their opinions are unpopular. But neither does the government have to grant them the right to parade where they please just because they are speaking.
Don't believe me? Try applying for a permit to march through a residential neighborhood at 3 am. You'll be denied. Try marching, and you could legitimately be arrested, and telling the judge that the Constitution promises freedom of speech will not get you out of the slammer. Thus should it be with spamming.
Better yet...
Send all of the e-mails out to ABUSE at the ISPs being used.
Send hundreds of them, constantly.
I promise not much spam will get out before the ISPs pull the plug.
For added effect, put ABUSE @ ISP in the reply field.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
If both those fail, then maybe he *should* be in the spam business.
Spam can generate a real return on investment, actually.
Unfortunately, it's quite probably partially to blame for the fall of the internet's advertisement market.
Because of spam, nobody trusts advertisement agencies. Because nobody trusts them, less people purchase online. Because less people purchase online, web-sites investing loads on legit advertisement don't make a return on their investment. Because Spammers reach more customers, cheaper, they sometimes profit.
Thus - SPAM killed the dot-coms. (Well, not really -- but it makes for a good anti-spam argument.)
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Just make sure that you put all of your superiors' email addresses in your list to spam. That'll probably cure them of wanting to send out SPAM!
If not, it would be a great way to quit your job.
The full contact information for you manager would more subtly be put where *they* will never notice it - the whois record .
:-).
Oh - you DO have the FULL list of internal addresses for your organisation in your spam list too. Including all the possible variations on each address, naturally, plus a few million more that are *almost* right and just waste resource. (You don't need to feel guilty about spamming yourselves this way
That might bring a different perspective to the "wonders" of spam when your own staff all start complaining.
Of course, if you're a legitimate company, the customers you alienate into never even considering your product will more than offset any potential gains from spamming. When I got a spam from a company offering my previous employer's products (Satellite TV stuff) quite a few employees complained and the word from upper management was one of the conditions of selling our stuff was not using UCE to do it.
Of course, it'd be fairly easy to end the spam plague by making it computationally expensive to send a list to 20,000,000 people. And those 20,000,000 people could easly do that by requiring that any E-Mail that goes to them does so in encrypted form (To a 4096 bit key ideally.) They could whitelist mailing lists easily enough. My PGP (Well... GPG) key would have an EULA prohibiting its use for commercial E-Mail...
However, no one will ever do that so Congress will have to screw around and try to create laws that don't conflict with the constitution and which don't do any good anyway.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
... because I'm the admin for a domain AND the tech director, so I have a policy that anyone who spams looses their email address for a week. I've not had any spam come out of my domain since that policy (actually I have, a customer's box was an open relay, but I fixed it quickly and efficiently.
:)
However, as a bonus to those in my company who might feel they are loosing a sales channel here, I remind them of a few facts.
1) If you spam, you are likely to hit at least one person that's highly knowledgeable, and just as unethical as you are. This opens you up to a high chance of unwanted cracker attention (I'd use the word hacker here, it terrifies them more
2) It's amazing just how much BAD will these things generate, and some people will go out of their way to get your legitimate ISP to shut you down as well. A lot of ISPs will do this for fear of hitting the RBL.
3) Speaking of the RBL, there are some lists that will include you for taking part in this kind of behaviour. If you are traced (and that's by no means impossible), you could loose your email and internet lines.
Give us your domain so we can blackhole you now, and you can take that to your management.
t
XML causes global warming.
This is why marketing people should not be allowed to use computers (though I can think of more than a few other atrocities).
The expectation was that after consistently being defaced every time spam was sent out, the boss would think that spam was more trouble than it was worth. As it turned out, we never had to resort to this plan, since the company was driven into the ground first.
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Take the lists of addresses and emails, pretend you are really spamming thousands, while in reality you only spam a couple of accounts (yours and your boss's)... fake the logs
Make them think "spam: bad, it never attracts clients"
Also, tell your ISPs that you are working at a company that only got their Internet connection to spam from.... get the ISP to terminate the account after a few days... get this arranged with their head admin. Make it look totally real.
Ever need an online dictionary?
Yep. And then be extradited to Nevada to stand trial. California cannot put you on trial for someone you do outside of California; they can only send you back to where the crime was committed.
Likewise, California cannot put you on trial for something you did somewhere else that isn't illegal there. The only trick is making sure you understand where the law says your actions take place.
why stay under their employment if you cant agree with their morals and ethics? if your not happy with what your doing go find a new job, let someone else do the work you know is wrong
I'm not too thrilled about spammers, but I'm even less thrilled about the precedent this sort of thing for the Internet--inter-jurisdictional issues are not nearly as cut and dried as they are for physical infractions. If you offed someone in Nevada, for instance, you were in Nevada when you did it--no question about jurisdiction, obviously you violated a local law while you were locally present. Across the Internet, though, things are a bit more hazy--how can you violate California law if you were never in California? Does this hold true for New York? England? Sri Lanka? What about if you don't even know where the destination of your message is physically located? What if the mail server is in one state, but the user is in another? You sent it to my home server in Washington, but maybe I'm on vacation and check my mail from San Francisco. What then?
I guess the best physical analogy would be if you were standing in California and shot across the border and killed someone in Nevada. I have no idea what would happen with such a case--possibly at that point it would be a federal crime, because state lines were crossed in the commission of a felony? I dunno. But I'm not too hot on localities being able to impose their local laws on any user anywhere in the world.
No relation to Happy Monkey
But guess what? There is a real cost associated with the KKK marching in DC, or giving some speeches in your hometown. There was also a very real cost when thousands of protesters showed up at the WTO meeting in Seattle.
Trolls throughout history:
Jonathan Swift
I would prefer that you list your boss's home phone number on here so that we can call him and reason with him... ;-)
x-empt wrote, "Take the lists of addresses and emails, pretend you are really spamming thousands, while in reality you only spam a couple of accounts (yours and your boss's)... fake the logs"
Oh, that's great! I love it! Except I'd add a few other accounts to the list. How about webmaster@fbi.gov, abuse@aol.com, the webmaster at spam.abuse.net, postmaster@cauce.org, and key individuals at other various law enforcement and anti-spam groups?
I think that might get a little bit of extra action ;)
"...get the ISP to terminate the account after a few days..."
That's even better. And I can't think of an admin that wouldn't do it. Happily.
I was placed in a similar position when I was CTO of a company and the marketing weenies decided to start a spamathon.
Remember that the main motivator is money when you're dealing with marketing/sales people. If ethics won't sell them on the spam=BAD equation, then use money to do it. I wrote a lengthy memo (I don't recall whether I saved a copy or not) describing the possible negative side-effects of starting a spam campaign.
The primary negative was revenge. Ask them how they'd like to have their 800# shut down by people calling to complain, or how they'd like their main Web site (not just the spam machine) and network compromised and destroyed by anti-spam hackers. Ask how they'd like the fax machine to be constantly busy and out of paper. Ask how they feel about hauling in the lawyers to respond to complaints that they've violated California's anti-spam law (you don't have to be in California--you just have to spam someone in California). Even if they can show they didn't violate the law, it'll cost money to fight it.
When I made this argument to the marketing guy, he said that if someone did that to us, they'd be breaking the law. I told him that wouldn't prevent people from doing it! I also had him read CAUCE propoganda and other anti-spam materials.
I'm not sure whether he ended up seeing my point, or gave up out of frustration having to deal with me, but he gave up.