Slashdot Mirror
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?"
According to the affidavid filled by the plantiff, they were not involved in sending unsolicited email, and thus not violating any terms of use. If you possibly opted in through some other company then maybe it isn't technically spam? (according to the TOS)
The point I'm trying to make is I can understand why the court wants to show some restraint before allowing an ISP to cut a firm's internet access. What would be the consequences if they cut the pipes and then sorted it out? Monster Hut could be deprived alot of revenue!
I'm not trying to defend Monster Hut as they could very well be guilty. I just think that we should be pleased with the Judge's injunction until this gets litigated.
Since spam is getting more and more of a problem, I've decided to release my partial solution (content based spam filtering). :( ).
t ar.bz2
It currently kills about 70% of the spam I receive (still leaving about 20 messages per day in my normal mailbox
ftp://ftp.bero.org/pub/experimental/NoSpam-0.0.1.
And yes, it kills spam from monsterhut.com.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Some interesting points so far...
The biggest part of the case is whether this was actually a case of unsolicited email or not. The Defendant has stated that they believed Monsterhut was an opt-in advertising service when, in fact, they buy their lists externally with the apparent assumption that these are genuine opt-in customers.
The Plaintiff has pointed to a provision in the contract that allows for a 2% complaint rate to avoid immediate termination of their contract. First, whoever agreed to this for the ISP should be shot considering the sheer amount of traffic Monsterhut can throw out and the number of spam messages that 2% allows for (the Plaintiff even mentions a number over 6 million outgoing messages to date, if I remember right). Apparently, this provision exists to protect Monsterhut from users who opt-in but later forget (or change their minds). When the ISP receives complaints, they are to forward them to Monsterhut who will verify the address, validity of the complaint, and apparently make the appropriate changes to their database. Makes you warm and fuzzy to know your complaints are, in fact, going directly to the spammer.
An interesting side effect to all this is the ability to verify individuals. Quite a lot of attention is paid to whether the individuals could be identified according to their email addresses and the fact that SpamCop removes this information. It seems this comes in to play during the complaint / remediation process. But it is even more important when dealing with the court. The Defense pointed out that the Plaintiff had ample opportunity to subpoena SpamCop for identifying information, but failed to do so.
One final interesting tidbit... the Judge wanted to define the difference the Defense saw between a case of one of the 2% mistaken users and a "true spam" case. The Defense began to talk about harvested email accounts that are not user email accounts, such as those used for contacts in Network Solution's whois database. The Plaintiff apparently perks up on this, grabs the ball, and attempts to run. It appears that Monsterhut does "use Network Solutions" to identify businesses offering services that could be marketed by Monsterhut. Since they only send mail out to, say, 5 "targeted" customers... why... this isn't the kind of mass emailings that we're all talking about. Not spam at all. Nosir.
look at all the junk snail mail you get every day, do you think that's going away any time soon?
My standard reply seems to work well. You could also try to look at some consumer groups, they have good advice on this.
'I will inform all my friends and their dog about your harassive and misleading marketing' (which I actually never do, griping about junk mail is boring) ... 'I hereby forbid you to send
me any mail in the future. I am not interested
in you products and never will' ... 'Legal actions may follow' (Some companies sending junk mail do not have large legal depts, so I try to scare them).
For the junk mail send to me by without an address, I have a 'No junk mail here, please' sticker on my mailbox. And if I get some, I call the local post office. The amount of junk mail I receive has diminished by about 75% in two years. Some of my neighbours have started imitating me, as they are getting sick of junk mail.
As absurd as spam seems, it works.
Sometimes spam is counter-productive.
The spam I get is mostly 'harvested' from the company website. Most of the spam we get is 'evaluate our new (MS-Win) software'. The department I work in has about 40 Linuxes, 5 Sun and 3 Mac workstations and 2 Windows machines for the secretaries. So, we do not use Windows software expect the Office package that the secretaries use. This is also clearly stated in our website.
The company spam policy is:
1. Sending spam is strictly forbidden. (This applies also to the marketroids, not only R/D where I work). Spamming would lead to suspending of e-mail account (or the employee, depending on how bad it was).
2. Any spam received should immediately be reported (forwardedto ). A 'legal actions may follow' reply describing our spam policy is sent to the spammer, his/her boss and the webmaster/sysadmin of the spam-sending company. In a few days, the spammer is added to a corporate blacklist for some period of time (something like 3 months). The spam-sending company is also informed on our policy. Anyone on the blacklist will have the following treatment: Any mail sent to our employees from their addresses is dumped automatically. No business will be made with anyone on the blacklist. Repeated spamming results in that we contact the ISP and CEO of the company sending spam, and ask them to stop the harassment.
Some of our departments are Win-only, so the blacklist policy is actually hurting spammers. An their bosses are infomed on that.
Sadly you're right. Large companies with extensive legal resources can do pretty much whatever they want to indvidual clients. It's only when the victim has some money that things start to get interesting.
Anyway, I didn't dispute that. I'm just saying that there should be some recourse. Companies might be more careful about breaking contracts if they risked large punitive damages.
Finland has an interesting system regarding traffic fines. They're based on your salary, so if you're a billionare you still have to worry about getting caught speeding - the fine could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It makes a lot of sense.
The same kind of system should apply in these situations. If AT&T costs me a years wages by cutting off my connection (say I'm a consultant who works from home) then they should be liable for a year's worth of their revenue. Then they would have to think seriously before breaking their contracts.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Almost sounds as though the judge specifically wants to go through the entire process, check and doublecheck at every step of the way, to provide a rock-solid, bullet-proof, airtight precident against spammers that other courts can then gleefully use to go after spammers double-barrled. Sounds like a good idea to me.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.