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Spammers Stoop To New Low
mathowie writes "I received an unsolicited spam this week from MonsterHut, extolling the virtues of their "products" which are "email marketing" (they're a spam cannon). After reporting it at Spamcop, I received an interesting email from their bandwidth host. It seems that before they could cancel MonsterHut's account for violating their terms of service, MonsterHut began suing them. The worst part? A judge granted MonsterHut a temporary restraining order, forcing Paetec to keep their site online while they continue spamming, before Paetec even knew about the suit. Paetec is collecting affadavits from people that received the spam, so if you did, fill one out. It may be their only chance against the court. How far will spammers go to get their word out? When's it going to stop?"
I don't care if the entire email is one big remove message, if its unsolicited advertising then I'll laugh at their corpses. I know you were kidding, but some idiots really believe that they can eat my bandwidth just as long as they claim to have an option that says 'yes, I do read your spam. Now don't send that particular one again'.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Nicely put. But in USA(c) or United States of America (for Corporations), what did you expect? A sane legal system?
The thing I can't understand is why has PaeTec sold the service to MonsterHut? I thought MonsterHut is a well-known spammer. If someone is well known to violate the policies of the corporation I work in, they end on our 'corporate blacklist' and will not be dealed with. Sometimes we share the blacklists with a few of our competitors so that someone having/being a constant problem will not be able to change from one to the other provider. For example, if someone can't keep his deals with one of our competitors, why should he treat us differently? We don't take risks like that. No company can be forced to sell/buy a service/product. This is also a good way of saving legal costs and trouble. I think 10% of our customers make 90% of the trouble.
Activities that will generally put you to our blacklist include spamming, paying bills only after 3rd reminder, and some other things.
Spam is heinous, but with all of the talk about bringing government regulation to the internet, people need to consider that politicians usually want a hot button issue to wave around while they pass some hidden adgenda. Spam would be the perfect poster child for the pols to use as an excuse to regulate the hell out of the net in other ways. Sometimes one has to accept the price of a free system ie spam AND viruses. The savy user is already dealing with those WITHOUT and help from regulators. Maybe the problem is that the net is used by too many non technical whiners who want someone to hold thier hand.
"I would just shut off MonsterHut."
This equals "I will rot in jail for contempt of Court."
"But you better get your shit together and make sure you can prove they are spamming."
They tried this. They brought affidavits to Court showing numerous complaints from those that have email addresses setup for only Network Solutions contact, and spam traps that have never been used for public email, etc.
"Something that puzzles me though is I wonder why the ISP didn't force MonsterHut to sign to some kind of agreement that protects the ISP and grants power to the ISP to cut them off for violating the TOS."
They did have an agreement that specifically banned "B.U.C.E." or SPAM. But MonsterHut argued that they should be allowed to continue unless 2% of the 69 million emails sent came back as complaints! PAETEC has been warned by Vario (their upstream provider) that they are in danger of being cut off because of this!
"This should be a lesson for other ISP's who may know how to run an ISP (e.g. technically) but not how to protect themselves legally."
Fat chance. PAETEC had a contract negotiated with MonsterHut which the Judge examined and found to be valid, but he issued the injuction anyway, inspite of MonsterHut not meeting deadlines for depostions, etc.
Thats nice that you the end user, don't mind gettng your "few messages" a day and delete them, but this isn't about you the end user. This is about me, the network/system operator. I personally don't give a shit about your silly little mailbox. I do though about your silly little mailbox multiplied by tens of thousands. If every one of my users recieve a few messages a day, that quickly translates into several millions of messages per week. Guess what, this is a real cost. A real cost of disk space, a real cost of support hours, a real cost of bandwidth, a real cost of CPU utilization, a real cost of abuse time trying to clean it all up. You don't have to clea up after spam, I do. When you look at the big suckhole and start adding up all the costs of diskspace, time and bandwidth across all providers, you have a major problem with billions in dollars in losses just so you can have a bigger cock.
Why I hate spam ? Easy, here are the reasons :
...).
1. It's a violation of my privacy. In the country I live, it is illegal to collect and use information about individuals without notifying them and let them correct the info.
2. It hides non-spam messages. As spammers do not mark they messages as advertisements, it is sometimes difficult to spot real email among a list of spam email.
3. It forces me to hide. I cannot use my email on usenet, on the web. I have to use tricks when I have to give my email, those cost time. Multiple email are mandatory to protect your privacy.
4. There is no limit in the amount of spam email you can receive. As it costs almost nothing to send spam, the number of email you receive can be very impressive and cost you time and money. It is worse if you have multiple emails (work, home, topic1, topic2, school, work2, usenet, mobile phone,
5. It can interrupt your work. like said in a previous post.
6. It is a menace for children. Some spam are offensive, illegal or pornographic making the internet a unsafe place in the mind of parents.
7. Spammers hide themselves and forge emails in their messages. You can not answer, complain to their messages.
8. More, as they use a hotmail, yahoo or other email address, these services are sometimes blocked or suffer bad image.
9. Remember that unlike postal advertising, YOU pay for spammers, the whole internet community pays for them.
10. It is illegal, period.
When I'll have time, I'll publish this on my web site : http://unixe.net .
M.G.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
First off, spam usually equals scam. Think those penis pump devices work or that credit fixer is going to do anything than offer you a high interest load?
Second, unlike traditional junk mail spammers do not pay the real cost for their mailings. Bandwidth is usually stolen. Guess who eats up the cost? The customers of the ISP. We're paying for the penis pumps HTML ads.
What? @home is $6 more this month! Wonder why.
Third, its inconsiderate to put someone on a mailing list and have them manually unsub themselves 10 times a day to avoid more spam.
Fourth, spammers won't agree to any convention for easy filtering, like Subj: ADV blahblah. Instead they send use fake names with misleading subjects to fool people into reading their aluminum siding ad. With an ADV tag we could put it straight into our spam folders or auto-delete it.
Spam sucks.
Sign the petition to convince Disney to bring Hayao Miyazaki's anime to the US.
Well, I'm not sure I would agree with that as a "right". In our society, there's a lot of stuff we'd rather not have to deal with, but that doesn't mean we should do away with it.
Ex: I'm particularly unfond (is that a word?) of white supremists. I would be willing to stand by them to support their right to say whatever they want though. Do I want to hear their rhetoric? Certainly not. But the moment we begin to say they can't express whatever they feel, we become judges. Then who's to say that a particular opinion that you (or I, or anybody else) have can't be censored or made "wrong"?
"And if all this spam was good and ethical, why are they forging From: addresses and using the "reply to this to be removed from our list" addresses to harvest more emails? It's not."
I would agree with you that it is unethical - and in fact, this is part of what I despise about spam. Personally, I think forging email headers should be illegal - that would certainly make filtering spam easier. However, this has little to do with my point. My point is not the ethicality or morality of such things - it's wheter we should be attempting to repress it from happening.
"Look, people, as has been stated before, if we don't find a solution to stop spam, email will become useless as a form of communication. And what, YOU all want to use M$ Messenger Service or AIM?"
After all, mail was made completely useless by junk mail. Hell - nobody uses mail for anything more - they all just use the telephone. To go back to my example, the US is a completely useless place to live (well, ok, maybe this isn't a good example *grin*) because with one bad thing in it (in my example, the white supremists) the whole thing is made bad.
Give a man a match, you keep him warm for an evening.
Light him on fire, he's warm for the rest of his life
Spammers are scum. When I used to be an active anti-spammer (gave it up a few years back as it got to be too much of a time suck -- kind of like SlashDot is now. ;-) ) I had to deal with mail bombs, death threats, revenge spam, etc. Very interesting times.
:p) my e-mail address was numeric (ie. my phone number). After getting dozens of spam messages delivered there (no stretch to send e-mails from 090-0000-0000 to 090-9999-9999, right?), I got sick of it and registered my alias. I hadn't even started USING the address and I'm already getting about 5 spams a day to it (what, did NTT Docomo sell my damned address or something?) The damned phone WAS set to ring whenever I got an incoming mail, but I got tired of being woken up at 3:00am when some damned deai advertisement arrived, so I had to disable THAT too.
The ones who are really pissing me off now are the mobile phone spammers. I live in Japan and have to pay 300 yen (about $3.00 US) every month for the "privilege" of e-mail. Before registering my mail alias (I used a word which is NOT in common use in Japan
Not only do I pay 300 yen a month, but I have to pay per packet, so everytime one of these SCUMBAGS sends me spam, it's an actual yen or two increase in my monthly bill -- per message. It doesn't take long to add up.
So to the previous person who said, "Just calm down and hit 'delete'", there are many, many reasons to disagree with you.
There's always the debate: Is is spam or is it not spam? It's like the porno debate of a few decades ago - I know it when I see it but it's hard to define in law. Well, faking headers and using open relays are two of the ways you can tell for sure. If it's legit (ie, you opted-in), there's no need for the subterfuge.
I just love spam that at the bottom says: "This is not spam, blah, blah, blah....." Then why are you sending it through an open relay and pretending to be someone else???
However, as much as I hate spam, I agree with the original poster. The court doesn't know whether these guys are spammers. Better to err on the side of caution than put some struggling company out of business by mistake. I hope justice prevails in the end, though. And by that I mean that the spammers should be forced to listen to Britney Spears for 20-life. On second thought...that's not harsh enough.
Admit nothing, deny everything and make counter-accusations.
Actually, we have a very strong right not to listen. They can be allowed to say anything they want. They have no right to be up in my face to say it.
Consider, while I have every right to sing (badly) Jingle Bells at the top of my lungs in the middle of July. Does that same right extend to doing it outside your bedroom window at 3:00am? Of course not. Even if I'm not directly on your property I can get arrested for doing that. Free speech arguments won't hold any water against a disturbing the peace charge, even though free-speech is a constitutional right. Ergo, my "right" to free speech does not trump your "right" to a pleasant existance and a good night's sleep.
Now when you consider that my e-mail address is my property, I've paid good money for it after all, what right do they have to come stomping up on to my property with their shouted slogans of cheap furniture or judgements collected? Take this one step further to the poster who's getting spam on his cell-phone and having to pay for it.. or the fax spammers that existed before the law was put in to stop them. When spammers use *my* resources (time, bandwith, paper, storage, money) to do their marketing, without my permission - that's wrong, and should be stopped.
The difference between Dmitri and Spam is that only those who wanted to hear what Dmitri had to say went to listen to him. Those that didn't, didn't hear him. If you WANT to get spam and opt-in to all kinds of lists, well, go ahead. Until I opt-in though.. spammers can stay the hell out of my mailbox.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze