The Lone Guns Against Spam

crotherm points to a piece in today's L.A. Times, writing: "This would a great article to pass along to those less knowledgable about SPAM and those that fight against it." It's also a bit frightening to see what happens to people on the wrong side of the spam battle sometimes, though denials of service are attributed to both spammers and de-spammers, each by the other.

Comments

Re:This is absurd!

[Tackhead]

>I run a legitimate multi-level internet business,

This is NOT MLM! This is NOT a scam! It's 100% legal! The guy who spammed me and suckered me into it TOLD ME SO! Really!

> I think that digital solicitations provide a valuable service to consumers

If you were subsidizing my email account, you'd be entitled to spam the bejeezus out of it. But you're not. I'm the owner of my server, and I decide what's a valuable service and what's not. Not you. Because it's not yours.

When you pay for my server - or if I'm in Europe, my per-minute-local-calls, or if I'm in the US and reading it on a cellphone, my cell phone bill, or if I'm an ISP, the bill for the 30% capacity I have to add to /var/mail and /usr/spool/news that's currently taken up by spam - then, and only then, do you have a right to advertise on my hardware.

> Please, I urge you, give us a break, we're just trying to get by the only way we know how.

On the very slim chance that you're not a troll:

If the only way you know how to make a living is by stealing the resources of others, I hope you either (a) learn another way of making a living, or (b) starve to death.

Theft is not a viable business model. Until you've learned that, please fuck off. Fuck off, stay fucked off, and don't come back until you've finished fucking off.

Re:It's quite simple

[FortKnox]

Here's something useful if you have your own domain with unlimited aliases:
Put the name of the website as the name of the email. For example:
slashdot.org@mydomain.com
Filter it in your favorite email reader, and when you are tremendously bored you can go through your trash folder see what websites sold your name to spammers...

Spam costs in many ways

[Hormonal]

I see a lot of people here defending spam, which is fine. You have a right to your opinion, no matter how wrong it is. Unfortunately, most people are looking at this from a somewhat U.S.-centric point of view, which allows them to overlook the real cost of spam.

First of all, it's an annoyance. I have to set up filters to get rid of what I can, delete what gets through the filters, and wait for it to d/l from the server (this would be a bigger deal if I was on a modem, rather than cable.) I go to great pains to make sure I get very little spam in my main inbox, by putting noone@nowhere.com in every damn e-mail box I fill out on the internet, unless I really trust the vendor. Friends and family get a second, not-so-important e-mail account to send to, and they get my real address after they show me they're not imbeciles. I shouldn't have to screen people like this, but I do, just to avoid spam.

Secondly, the main reason spammers get put in jail or otherwise reprimanded is because they send out such huge amounts of spam, they crash someone's server, and that someone gets pissed. Even though my cable modem is $50/month regardless of how much spam I get, spam costs someone money, in terms of downtime and misused resources.

Finally, I know that some people pay for their internet connections based on the amount of data transferred (this is for regular consumers, too, in some countries), and if I got charged a flat rate per byte (kilobyte, whatever), I'd be really pissed if every time I checked my mail, I got spam in addition to my real mail. A lot of newbies are probably getting these kind of accounts, and are ending up paying double or triple what they would pay if their inboxes were spam-free.

Spam has real costs, which can be expressed in terms of real dollars, not just in terms of wasted time. It's unfortunate that spammers can send for free. If they had to pay for postage out of their pocket, I think we'd see a lot less of it. I am all for getting spammers to quit.

Taking your advice

[banuaba]

Under crotherm's advice, "This would a great article to pass along to those less knowledgable about SPAM and those that fight against it", I have 'passed' this article along to every distribution list at my place of employment, most of the newsgroups on Usenet, and I modified an IRC bot to post the URL in all of the channels on EfNet, DALNet and Openprojects.

Thanks for your help and support in the fight against spam.


Brant