Slashdot Mirror
Spam Under Legislative Attack in Europe
Anonymous Coward writes: "CNN has an article in their Science and Technology section detailing how the European telecommunication ministers have agreed that unsolicited e-mail and wireless text messages should be prohibited under a new data protection law. They also are agreeing to allow leeway for law enforcement to access logs of e-mail and telephone traffic.
In a place where Internet traffic is priced by the megabyte or minute and SMS service by the message, I would imagine the motivation to eliminate spam is a little bit higher than in the country of flat rates.
Sure I hate spam with a passion, but why is everyone so up in arms about it? Phone solicitation is soooo much more annoying. Why don't people enact laws against that. At least I can automatically filter out spam.
Most of the spam that I receive is coming from China and South Korea. I don't think legislation will help much. I would rather see them BGP'd to /dev/null.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Most of the spam I get now, is from companies that are using "contractors" to spam, or spam from offshore (i.e. China) ISP's. The advertised product is from the US often, but the advertisee is not. Therefore, shutting down the "spammer" isn't going to do anything.
Now I don't know how to practically impliment this, as there are some pitfalls, but with some decent legislation, we could make it possible to target the beneficiary of the spam. That makes it possible to attack the real reason for the spam - where we can use our laws etc to attack it.
Sure, there will be spam that also has you send you money to China/Afganistan etc, but that will make the spam much less profitable, as most people won't do so. Lastly, most people will use credit cards, and I assume that most SPAM scams are frauds too, so the chargebacks will be hell for the spam beneficiary.
Anyway, it just seems that we can't just attack the spammer, we really need to attack the beneficiary. Then the spammers will go away, as they can't find anyone to demand their services.
Sure, I'm crazy, but what the heck!
We spend hundreds of kilobytes yammering about the great firewall of China, in particular laughing at the futility of it--legislation that stops the flow of information seems to be something we protest when implemented, and deride when proposed.
This is of course, while we upgrade our procmail recipes and secretly wish for a legally-mandated X-this-is-spam header.
In the end isn't stemming the flow of unwanted spam essentially the same thing? Going with the datahaven theory, eventually all your spam will come from the countries that _do_ allow spamming. And then all your bulk-marketing companies will set up branch offices there.
It starts making draconian black hole lists start seeming like the only viable solution. Because legislation sure don't work.
I have a fax number attached to my mobile phone as part of my plan. I don't use it much, so I didn't bother finding out the number for the first few weeks I had it. In that time period I got no less than 84 pages of, you guessed it, spam. Although this pales next to the amount of email spam I receive, it is shocking to know that I can get spammed when even I don't know my address.
Anything that reduces the volume of electronic junk I receive is good. I applaud the Europein Union for this, and I hope that it comes to the USA very soon.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Uh, so I can finally jail my aunt -- the one that only knows how to hit the "forward" button in AOL -- for her unsolicited relentless onslaught of "forward this to 20 people to support (insert random hippie political point here)..." crap?
But if you could get spam to originate from only a few spam havens by ongoing legislation, it would be much easier to bully the remaining countries who allow spamming to change their minds. Blocking off ip ranges from the internet is a relatively easy task, and if people hate spam that much, the majority of ISP's would be on-board. Is it right to do this, perhaps not. Is it possible, definately!
Personally, when my network receives spam from a company, I send them a bill. Sure it costs me minimum 35 cents for postage, and the bills average only 12 cents, and I have yet to receive payment, but it's the principle of the issue. And more often than not, I receive a letter or a phone call back regarding the charges, so in some way I get my money.
It seems to me that the telecommunications ministers have much larger things to deal with than cookies. Do they really have the power or reason to deal with the Application layer of the system? Now my site needs a policy to tell people that my app server likes to set cookies? Anyone wish for the time when the web was less commercial?
I don't like spam, but I don't want any laws against it. If you want freedom, you have to support everyone's freedom... even if you hate them. The only law I would support is one that mandated a way to get off a spammers list... AND the remove must work.
At $200 per fax, you could make $16,800. Maybe you should look into that.
Again, the pressuring of people's ISPs is precisely the type of strongarm tactics we condemn in Great Britain. I think I missed my point in my previous post--yes, you can eventually legislate, sue, and arm-twist to get your way on the net--I just laugh at the hypocrisy, that's all.
Whatever happend to the the can of Spam icon /. used to use for articles related to spam?
And I wholehartedly agree. But hell, I don't own the Internet...
This is a very small number of liberals.. the far left wing. When W gets 90% approval ratings, do you think that the country is 90% conservative? Very similar to the far right wing who would like to inject religion into every part of the government but fail to see that they are not very different than the Taliban who were very successful in forcing religion into the government.
Spam is no joke when consider that in some parts of the world, Internet service is pricey and there is no such thing as a flat rate. If you paid per MB or per minute of connect time, you would "get it" for sure. As the U.S. concept of "unlimited" internet service gets less and less "unlimited", the spam issue will only get hotter.
Personally, I have a zero tolerance policy -- I trace the headers and file complaints. No exceptions. I managed to get one spam website TOS'ed off 3 ISPs, as well as a direct hit on their DNS capability, just by recycling the same message headers as the spammers got booted from one ISP to the next. I find that complaint messages work better when I have a meaningless bunch of keywords at the bottom. Wonderful things like DMCA, copyright, infringement, litigation, trademark, liability, etc.
On to the telemarketers. If you live in a state that has a manadatory "do not call" list, get on it. Otherwise, write to your state rep. and lobby for one. I live in Connecticut, where the DNC list has hit the telemarketers like a "bunker buster".
Then we have the junk mail. That gets stuffed back into the "business reply envelope" and returned at the sender's expense. I heard someone suggest keeping a supply of junk mail on hand at all times, so as to overstuff whatever business reply envelopes you might receive. I pay for trash removal. The people who send me this junk can pay to take it away, not me.
Within the midst of the world out there, there's a subworld. Communications developing to a point that I can hit on a girl in Indiana from Vancouver Canada through that simple "uh-oh" sound that we've all grown to despise and eventually thalamus out of our minds. My friend was convinced she was going to go on a trip to Holland to meet this guy she met over AIM.
And it goes on.
In the meantime, governments are trying to make the world more comfortable for... well... themselves... without even understanding what's going on.
The ramshackleness (is that a word?) of the world almost resembling the Austro-Hungarian empire prior to World War I is being manipulated by the people with access to this technology to transcend borders. Pornography of 14-year olds is illegal... except in the old Soviet republic of Fookerplakistani (apologies to Austin Powers)...
So it's possible, no matter where you are, to have access to pictures of naked 14-year-old Fookerplakistinians.
This is another attempt of them trying to regulate this borderless world. It's not bloody possible. 50% of the spam mail I get is in some foreign language that is neither french nor english, which suggests to me that it's from outside of Canada, and thusly any regulation the Canadian government will try to do will be in vain because it'll probably cut down on about 2% of my spam mail.
They're slowly trying to work their way into the internet, between Gore "fathering" the internet and the crackdowns on filesharing (I still say that Napster getting shut down was the greatest thing to happen to MP3s since WinAmp...) are becoming more and more regimented (Even audiogalaxy has filters now. Damnit).
So, I guess the point I'm getting at is that this is going to be a slow process because they're just not going to understand that it's a futile move on their part and that the more they try to regulate, the more loopholes the l33t h4x0rz and bored computer geeks will find. But they'll bury their heads in the sand and say that they've won the war on "indecent internet usage" or something like that simply because they've instated a sieve.
Karma: Non-Heinous
No. In the case of the Great Firewall of China (and Saudi Arabia), a third party is attempting to block information people want. As such, the sheer number of minds applied to circumventing those artificial barriers all but assures they will be overcome.
Contrast with spam filtering, where a third party is attempting to block information people don't want, with the full support and agreement from said people. This makes the number of sociopaths trying to circumvent the barriers vanishingly small. Moreover, because people support the blocks, the number of people willing to report spammers who penetrate security is considerably higher (as opposed to the China/Saudi situation, where there's likely a silent agreement that the authorities are not informed when the barriers are breached).
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Anti-spam legislation is intended to allow people to stop receiving information (?) they don't want.
This is not about control of the Internet. This is about control of my e-mail inbox, the one I pay for.
If I could set up my email system in such a way that it will only receive email after receiving notification from paypal that an amount X has been transferred to me, I would cease to receive spam overnight. My personal threshold would be 25 cents - less than a stamp but enough to be noticed. This would deter spammers, but not keep entities with a reasonable expectiation that I want the mail from emailing me. It might even deter those pesky friends that keep sending me copies of jokes that were already old when I was still young.
Between friends engaging in conversation, the amounts paid would balance out. But in the case of one way communication, I'd get paid a bit for the time I spend looking at my emails.
Obviously, this can be implemented with reasonable effort pretty quickly. There are some minor details to deal with, nothing traumatic though: The sender would have to be able to determine what the going receiving rate of the recipient is. There needs to be a functional and pervasive micropayment system (paypal). Mail programs would need to be updated to deal with the added protocols.
I find it amusing how politicians still think they can regulate the Internet by way of stroke of pen. They'll have to learn the hard way. Sadly, we'll have to suffer in the meantime.
At least in most of the US, that is. All you have to say is "do not call this number again" and they are legally obligated to put you on a do-not-call list. If they call again within 10 years (the time limit may vary state to state), you can take legal action against them.
New York even has a website where you can submit your name, address & phone number for a semiannually-distributed list from the state of people who have opted out.
Try that with SPAM, as things sit right now.
would have to have an aircraft carrier to enforce it. There are, however, tech solutions *other* than black lists that work with little or no undesirable side effects: spamgourmet.com, for instance.
who's moderating the meta-moderators?
It is not the plain advertisement that gets most people, it is is the theft of service. It is the tactics of stealing the addresses of those that post on message boards and newsgroups. Slashdot is not immune as I have received 3 spams emails in as many days to the address I use for posting here. Do you supprt tha ability of someone to force you to spend time and money to receive the piece when they, in *no* way, support the medium? If they want to advertise, then let them do so in TV, radio, or print since that would support those services. Junk mail from the postal service remains inexpensive because of the bulk mailers that pay for the services. Until the medium is supported, I will combat spam with everything I have an take it to any means necessary.
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
You don't have to look that far or into fiction. If memory serves, the legal age in the Netherlands is 14. This includes posing for porn.
I dunno, I feel as though, while spam is an annoyance, placing a block on how information can be disseminated (sic?) is wrong. And where do you draw the line? By that measure, we should have placed limits on telemarketers long ago. On the other hand, if someone were to go spray paint an advertisement on the side of a bus, it would be illegal, as you would be damaging the bus system (much like how if you send out spam, you are placing a load, and therefore costing SOMEONE money, on a mail server somewhere). So there are precedents both ways.
The article doesn't have much meat to it. Boiled down, it says "The Council of Ministers think unsolicited email and SMS messages should be legislated against. Two weeks ago, European Parliament voted against a ban on spam".
Or, more briefly:
Council: Spam bad. Anti-spam laws good.
Parliament: We disagree.
I wish something had been said about how the Council plans to enforce anti-spam laws. I live in Washington (US), where the state government passed anti-spam laws several years ago.
I still get spam. Anti-spam legislation is well and good, but it doesn't seem to work.
If you outlaw mass-mailers, only outlaws will mass-mail. Or something like that.
Don't try to regulate spam as long as the agree to the following conditions:
1) the Must use @home service or
2) can only use 300 baud modems connected to pay phones outside a busy intersection.
3) must use win 3.X and trumpet winsock.
4) they must have a reply phone, fax and email address and 666 or spam tattooed on their forheads (they get to choose which...same same)
Then and only then can they avoid legislation.
Ought to help take a byte out of crime.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Jesus H. Grits, you need to get a new hobby. Can't you find something else to deconstruct, like Salon.com or something?
I disagree. Spammers are soooo much more annoying than phone solicitors.
-Phone solicitors don't immediately engage in sex talk with your 7 year old when he picks up the phone.
-Coming home from a long vacation doesn't usually mean you're going to have to sift through a blizzard of thousands of phone solicitation calls. (Interspersed by warnings from the phone company about how you're getting too many phone calls and would you like to buy more space?)
-When a huge amount of phone solicitations overwhelm the phone company and force them to invest in additional infrastructure, the cost is passed to the phone solicitors, not to you.
-If you have an unlisted number, and a phone solicitor calls, it doesn't automatically mean that the gig is up and the number is no good anymore.
-There actually exist phone solicitors who are not running scams.
-You don't get hundreds of phone solicitations in the space of 24 hours.
-Phone solicitors don't try to fool you by pretending to be people you know.
-Phone solicitors don't call you and offer to sell you a CD of the phone numbers they're calling.
-Phone company operators aren't kept awake at the phone company at 3 AM clearing wayward phone solicitations out of the equipment after a torrent of wrongly dialed phone solicitations.
-You don't get the same phone call from the same solicitor five times in a row in immediate succession, unless he has an organic brain disorder.
-While they can sometimes block the number from appearing at all, phone solicitors don't intentionally send forged numbers to your Caller ID box.
-If you tell a phone solicitor to take your phone number off his list, he doesn't immediately sell your number to all the other phone solicitors in town. ("It works, someone picked up the phone!") This is because we have laws dictating that phone solicitors cannot do this.
-And you can at least be rude to a phone solicitor. In fact, a phone solicitation from the PBA offers the quick-thinking solicitee a rare opportunity to safely tell off a cop. And you can do stuff like this:
ME: Hello?
PHONE SOLICITOR: (bubbly female voice) Hello, do you subscribe to the <name of local newspaper>
ME: Uh, no...
PHONE SOLICITOR: Oh my GOD! How do you get your news?
ME: Well, if you must know, the government implanted a chip in my brain, and now God and aliens just beam all that news right into my head. Why, isn't the chip in your brain working?
PHONE SOLICITOR: Uhh, OK, ummm... goodbye!
And in other news, the USA has approved a measure under which spammers will be execu^H^H^H^H^Htried in secret military tribunals
This may be one of the best legal solutions. Simply ban the "harvesting" of e-mail addresses from web pages and newsgroups and/or the selling of those addresses. Obviously, those things have no legitimate use, and are used only to send me crap that I don't want.
It would also be easy to catch people to prosecute them. Set up a web page that, when it's hit, generates an e-mail address, and logs that address along with the IP address and timestamp of when and from where that page was requested. When an e-mail comes to one of those addresses, get a little help from the ISP and you're well on your way to finding out who did it! Not just who sent it, but the scum that harvested the address!
Those people are the worst of all Internet citizens. If I was alone in a room with an e-mail harvester, and I had a baseball bat in my hand, it wouldn't be pretty.
That and banning ANY sender info or header forgery, require a valid mail or phone AND e-mail contact in all commercial e-mail, and I think the spam problem will be pretty much done. You might still get a few UCEs, but not the sheer quantity of stupid and annoying ones we get now.
I don't like spam, but I don't want any laws against it. If you want freedom, you have to support everyone's freedom... even if you hate them. The only law I would support is one that mandated a way to get off a spammers list... AND the remove must work.
Spam is not a freedom that people should be able to exercise, no more than direct marketers should be able to send out a pound of junk mail per household per day.
A real remove does not come close to being a solution. People shouldn't have to 'opt out' of spam; spammers should only be able to spam those who have opted in. Yeah, I know they wouldn't be able to spam anybody in that case, but that's the point. Spam is forcing something on an individual and making him or her pay for it. Consider that ISPs (i'm in the US) are looking into ways of charging high-bandwidth users more--AT&T has plans for this in the future (their 1.5 mbps bandwidth cap was their first step towards that; if you want more, you pay for it). Should I have to pay for Spam? Should the ISP have to pay for it?
Saying that people should be able to opt out of spam is a bit like saying Microsoft should be able to install spyware on your hard drive that monitors all the software you have installed, whether all your MP3s are legally ripped or downloaded, and tracks your every click online--unless you find the small print that says you can request to be put on the please don't f*ck me, bill, list.
Wait, that's WinXP, but there's no such opt-out option.
My point is that a remove list does not cut it. A small database containing the email addresses of all those who are willing to pay for and receive spam should be consulted by spammers first. If they insist on sending unsolicited email, they should be fined enough that it no longer is a profitable pursuit, however much the fine has to be.
A unified outgoing/incoming mail solution, relying on password-protected login for authentication so it can be accessed from any ISP, would facilitate validation of email addresses. This makes it easier to filter out, warn, or perhaps even prosecute those who abuse the email system.
If the government had those sort of powers to fight terrorism you'd all be up in arms, but if it's to fight spam you're all for it.
You forgot the obligatory 'witty cowboy neal' reference.
bitch, bitch, bitch.
Everyday I get snailmail spam. It's become so ubiquitous that I don't even complain anymore. But really it's worse than SPAM. It least you can just delete unsolicited email.. with unsolicited postal mail they waste paper. Why don't governments take an active role in emliminating waste POSTAL mail? SPAM is annoying, but at the end of the day, it's just wasted bits, not wasted natural resources..
god, I feel like such a hippy for complaining about this... I need to get back into floursecent lighting to regain my apathy and cynicism.
*Telephone rings*
/.?
Me: Hello?
Guy: Hi! Is this some random guy who is posting on
Me: Yup, thats me!
Guy: I wonder if I can have permission to send you an email.
Me: Why?
Guy: I need to send you an email to ask if you want to receive spam from me.
Me: WHAT? Oh, ok. By the way, what are you selling?
Guy: Email address lists.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
Some replies have already indicated how legislation in one jurisdiction may not be very effective in the jurisdiction-less world of the 'net.
I very rarely receive spam these days. This is my self-help tactic:
1. buy a domain name from a registrar that offers email aliases (this is inexpensive, 12euros from gandi.net, or US$15 from a few others). (i use gandi.net for registration and zoneedit.com for dns.)
2. set up an email address to forward to your normal ISP, or hotmail or whatever account. only give this address to trusted people.
3. set up a temporary spam email address (eg. temp1@yourdomain.com) and also forward it to your normal ISP/hotmail account. this is your 'public' address for web sites that require one. when you start getting spam, simply change it to temp2@yourdomain.com. no more spam.
at one stage i had about 10 different addresses all forwarding to my ISP account - it's interesting to see how and where they get around. i used one in usenet and one for web sites - the usenet one seemed to generate more spam.
another advantage is that you can keep the same 'main' address when you switch ISP or employer.
make sure you never give out your real ISP address.
for US$10-15 per year i have found this to be a very cheap and very effective spam-busting solution. it's worth registering a domain just for the control over email addresses. the ability to simply 'kill' the email address that's getting the spam is great.
Interesting idea, but doubtful to work with the current system in any way. (You really want to have to declare all of those micropayments on your 1040?)
Personally, I think some kind of pre-authorization scheme is better than a pay system - remember, this has to work in third world countries, too.
Brad Templeton has a neat system in place that is not too difficult to use at all. If you send him an email, you get the following:
OK - there goes 99% of your spam.
If spammers figure a way to reply, add a question and answer feature:
You could make the questions progressively tougher
Procmail could handle the rest of the mail, too, (if it weren't so damn hard to write recipes for. Yes, I know about the perl mail filters - I'm looking into them now.)
Imagine a procmail-type system that could strip attatchments and process them:
Since I get a lot of mail in Japanese, I could choose to detect DBCS text and run it through babelfish before I read it.
Most of these things could be and are being done. I bet there would be a market for a prewritten package customizable through a web interface. I would buy it.
What you do with incoming mail is a very personal decision - some people *like* mails that you and I would consider spam. There are always exceptions to the rules:
What happens when your mail filter blindly drops a mail from your wife telling that the baby just ate the Copier Toner or your housemate writes to tell you that a group of Real Naked Coeds are waiting in your room - get home quick! OK, neither of those situations are likely to occur, but you get the idea...
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
AOL via their "bring your own access" is just $9 a month and you can create/delete as many screen names as you want. Still too expensive?
There's always hotmail...
No need to spend a fortune of money or register your own domain just to get throwaway e-mail accounts.
However, how about the following idea: if a spam relay is not closed within, say, 2 business days, we start using it ourselves... to spam thousands of Chinese email addresses with anti-communist articles from various news sources. I betcha, that relay will get closed down real quick.
In most states, you can collect $500 from the originator for each violation.
Sounds like a good model for spam legislation.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
I'm sorry, I'm new at trolling, I'm much more better at sleeping
off to bed I fgo.
If only the governments of the world didn't have such a stringent, screwy obsession with "cyber crime legislation." Rather than whining and lobbying to our jurisdictional nannies to do something about spam, the more clueful private citizens could harass, berate and take action against spammers better, using less white-hat tactics than are required right now.
When we were growing up, absolutely no good ever came from telling your mom to beat up the bully's mom, so why are we telling our governments to beat up spammers and soft-line governments all the time?
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
I get 30 or 40 a day that slip through the filtering gauntlet I have set up .. unfortunately tracing each one would eat up my entire day ..
Mail clients should have a spam-vote button, a button that lets you vote for blacklisting the sender of the message you are just viewing.
If you press the button you get a warning, explaining what you're about to do. If you accept, a message including all the headers of the spam mail is created automatically and sent to a spam-vote server at your e-mail service provider. This vote server verifies that the vote comes from you, and then, possibly after some processing, sends your vote to one or more blacklisting services chosen by your e-mail service provider.
If there are just a few votes to blacklist a particular sender it's considered a mistake and no blacklisting occurs. The sender is blacklisted only if the number of votes is large. If a provider has a very large number of blacklisted senders, that provider may be blacklisted.
This would give technically clueless users a say in the matter. It would let clueless users send proper spam complaints, complete with all the headers. And it would allow people to stem the flood without revealing their e-mail address to fake opt-out lists that just increase the spamming.
When you press the spam-vote button, the mail client not only sends the spam vote. It also puts the sender in the client's own list of blocked senders, and removes all the messages that came from that sender. You can change your mind and remove the blocking, so you can receive messages from that sender again. Then the mail client creates another automatic message revoking the blacklist vote.
This way even the clueless will see what happens. A clueless user can't just keep sending a lot of blacklisting votes by mistake. Mistakes have consequences that have to be rectified.
At the server side, the system can be refined and improved over time. For instance, the voting services should count percentages rather than absolute numbers. They might also keep karma points and reputation scores. They might use collaborative filtering. Lots of different refinements are possible. Hopefully there would be several different services trying different strategies so the system evolves.
Users can then try different e-mail service providers with different spam-vote and spam-block policies. Probably many providers would let users choose among several alternatives. Tastes differ very much in this matter. You try different alternatives and see what works best for you.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for one day. Teach him how to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime. Unfortunately, he'll call you a miser for not giving him your fish.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
You don't get it; it's not (only) about going after the carrier of the message, it's about challenging the idiot that thought to benefit of the spam.
And their addresses are known and virtually all of them are in our own countries, how else could they do business with us...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Hmm, for example here in The Netherlands there is a central database where you can register to opt out of this curse, AND IT WORKS!
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Your comment about paying per SMS message makes no sense to me as it's the spammer that has to pay, not the recipient. Care to elaborate?
Monkey sense
Use a cruise missile
That should deter them.
2001-12-07 17:15:15 European Ministers to Control Spam and Cookies (spam) (rejected)
It was rejected before my browser could refresh (Less than 3 seconds). Either the Slashdot Admins hate me and have me on Auto Reject, or maybe they don't really read the content but instead use counters to post articles after so many requests.
"Well this one finaly hit 500 requests, go ahead and post it, what ever it is."
All the more reason to have your own page to post the stuff you find important or interesting, even if others find it boring as hell.
Opinions Expressed by Me should be Forced on Others - PbHead
I think legislation is the Right Thing[tm] to do right now. I'm not going into details, but the privacy concerns with ISPs stopping their customers from spamming is so great, I wouldn't want my ISP to be able to tell if I spammed.
The most significant problem is that the US is right now a spam haven, as about 90 % of my spam (get about 10 a day) comes from the US. If the US gets some good legislation too, the spam-havens will die, as the rest of the world will block them back to the stone age untill they get some good laws.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I live in Europe, the only SPAM I receive is from the US. I have 5 accounts (personal and business accounts) where I get +/- 140 to 200 spam messages. Most of these messages are "US deals only".
They should stop harvesting-email addresses as first, secondly SPAM should be something the end-user needs to decide about. I did not give permission to use my email address and send up to 200 messages to my accounts!
It's not the spammer that pays the price, but the end-user who can't get out of the list.
Often there are also "remove me" lines. It has came to my attention that they did not remove me though that it subscribed me to even more spamlists!
Is it that difficult to just have "Regulated spam-lists" ? no intrusion? I wouldn't like a guy knocking down my front-door announcing that I need a penis-enlargement or ADSL (that's only offered in the US and NOT in the EU anyway).
I neither need spam shoved down my throat like that, I don't even like the real SPAM!
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Replace the TLD for your email address with ".su". The .su domain used to be assigned to the Soviet Union, and was retired when the Soviet Union went CCCPut (couldn't resist the pun, sorry). Take my personal email address--it ends with "links.am". There is a links.am, but there is not now and will probably never be a links.su domain.
.su is a valid ccTLD. But the mail won't go anywhere and definetly won't land in your IN box.
.su-lution, and it works quite well. Back that up with a HotMail account for registrations, etc and you're pretty much spamproof.
Address harvesters will collect username@domain.su addresses, as
That's my
So ya wanna email me, eh? Change
Who cares where they send spam from! If they are a business that operates in a country where spam is illegal, sending spam to that country's citizens they are breaking the law and they can be tracked down! They have to provide SOME sort of contact information in the spam - otherwise you have no way of ordering their product.
I work for a company that has offices in both the US and England. I get about 50 spams/day on my work mail account. I wonder if I could get our IT department to move our mail server to the other side of the pond, and would that provide legal leverage to nuke these offspring-of-unmarried-syphillic-camels?
www.eFax.com are spammers
a _BUSH_ tactic? Excuse me, follow the money is a quote from either the movie version or the original story of the Watergate investigation, thank you Woodward and Bernstein. I don't remember whether they said it that way or Redford edited it to be that way. But the point is, it predates the Bushes. Which would be easy to realize if you just thought about it this way: it's an intelligent thought.
Most of my spam does not have a valid domain name in the return address. Reply fails. Looking at the "full" header shows the sender without even a domain name that match the xxxx.tld standard. If the ISP and E:mail programs would just reject anything that comes without a valid domain, we might start getting somewhere. Of course using someone elses domain name will start to occur (nothing is perfect).
WA state law makes it illegal to send commercial advertising without a valid e:mail address or having the subject line being misleading to WA state residents (you can register your e:mail address in their database so senders can look to see). This law does not work as no one knows who to go after unless we could call in the Feds to track spamming over interstate lines through router logs etc.
I have been using email since 1994 and my email box only gets maybe 1 or 2 spam emails per month. If I could be bothered to write a mail rule in outlook I am sure I could catch those quite easily (anything with a dollar sign is suspect because i live in the uk).
My point is: what did you do to get this crap?!?
I just checked my "deleted" folder in outlook - the last two emails I consider spam were actually from companies I probably opted in for (commision junction and another company i dealt with once).
Lucky me I guess.
Jamie.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
If everyone did this then perhaps companies would think twice before spamming.
However, you'd have to examine alices psychological profile regarding questions like "would you buy this?". Othervise bad thing could happen. :-).
/ Ralf
No. In the case of the Great Firewall of China (and Saudi Arabia), a third party is attempting to block information people want. As such, the sheer number of minds applied to circumventing those artificial barriers all but assures they will be overcome.
Contrast with spam filtering, where a third party is attempting to block information people don't want, with the full support and agreement from said people. This makes the number of sociopaths trying to circumvent the barriers vanishingly small. Moreover, because people support the blocks, the number of people willing to report spammers who penetrate security is considerably higher (as opposed to the China/Saudi situation, where there's likely a silent agreement that the authorities are not informed when the barriers are breached).
But obviously some people want spam. Thsi stuff is profitable. IF it wasn't it would have ended a long time ago. Spammers may be slimy, but they aren't stupid. If it costs them 5 cents per email (which I am completely making up, it's probably lower, but for this arguement, we'll say 5 cents) and they only get an increase in hits and sales which equals out to 2 cents per email, they would quit doing it. It's like the X10 ads, everyone complains about how they hate them, but they work. When they started doing them, the traffic on their site skyrocketed. So some people obviously do want them, they use them. Same thing with spam. If no one wanted it, then no one would click on the link and give them money.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
Banning header "forgery" is a very bad idea, if you mean that (as people usually do) to indicate making the email appear as if it came from someone other than the actual sender. [You may not have meant it so broadly, but a lot of people do, so I feel justified in pointing a few things out for at least their benefit, so forgive me for taking this opportunity to make a general rant about the issue.]
Note that RFC 822 explicitly allows the From: header to be something other than the actual sender of the message (though it does require a Sender: header, but MUAs tend not to display that). It's easy to "forge" From: addresses because email was designed with this "forgery" in mind. Note also that because of Received: headers, it's actually difficult to mask the message's true origins. It's just that most people don't know about headers, so they focus on the From: line.
RFC 822 gives several examples of how this feature of email can be used, but here are a couple from my daily life:
1) I am a sysadmin at a rather large organization. I often find the need, when acting in an official capacity, to send email to users as "manager" or "postmaster" or "security" or as some other hat that I wear. This makes people notice the email, marks it as a formal note, allows the other admins to deal with responses to the mail, and has a number of other benefits. For a variety of reasons, it would be rather unprofessional for me to send out such email as myself. (Should the tens of thousands of users we support have to keep track of the staff changes in the our department?)
2) On the side, I do hosting for a number of smaller organizations. Sometimes the people who run these organizations feel the need to send out an email in an official capacity. In this case, they often send the mail with a From: address of something like info@foo.org, and the message originates on a totally different network than the one on which the foo.org machines live. Should the senders be forced to log into the foo.org machines as the "info" user and run mutt or maix? It's much better for them to be able to use their preferred MUA and their ISP's MTA. [This is why I get worried when I hear about ISPs requiring certain From: addresses.] Also, the people who send the message are not always the ones who answer mail to info@foo.org. Should organizations be forced to structure themselves around the requirements of email?
That's just my personal experience -- there are lots of other cases, I am sure.
Keep in mind that email was in large part modelled after the US postal system. It's interesting to note that return addresses are not always required by the USPS (think about post cards).
That said, I do think that some sort of valid return contact information is important (and I do hate unsolicited {mail,email,faxes,phone calls}). We should, however, be careful when recommending that certain things be outlawed -- just because we can not see a legitimate use of something does not mean that such a use does not exist and that the people engaging in that use should be punished for the bad behavior of others.
<offtopic rant>
It seems like this issue arises a lot on slashdot, and among the newbies I talk to. People tend to bash large, highly featureful packages or protocols (e.g. sendmail and X11) because they think that the particular ways they use them apply to all other cases. It's a natural tendency, I suppose, but sometimes I feel like I should wear a button reading "that doesn't scale" or "what about the corner cases" or something similar when talking to junior sysadmins.
</offtopic rant>
Or my aunt... the one that only knows how to hit the "forward" button in AOL -- for her unsolicited relentless onslaught of "forward this to 20 people to support (insert random right wing religious/political point here)..." crap?
If world leaders had to deal with spam, then
it would go away. If Congressman and Senators
didn't have flunkies to fix their problem with
spam, then we'd see some action. I think we need to declare spam a form of terrorism and wage world wide war against spammers. We need long jail terms. Military tribunals. We need to confiscate all their property and wealth. Spam is a scourge on the civilized world. A disease that should be wiped out. I vote for the death sentence for repeat offendors! Die, spamming Dogs, die!!!!
Good thing I'm a calm person!
This is how you do it:
1) Go to your favorite web directory, where sites are paying per clickthrough (like Goto.com)
2) Search on any of these keyword phrases:
email marketing
bulk email marketing
direct email marketing
bulk email marketing campaign
email marketing company
email marketing software
opt in email marketing
targeted email marketing
permission email marketing
marketing email
email marketing services
email marketing tool
optin email marketing
online email marketing
email marketing program
email marketing list
email marketing campaign
free email marketing
bulk email work marketing
email marketing strategy
email marketing solution
permission based email marketing
email marketing uk
marketing email list
target bulk email marketing
email marketing consultant
direct email marketing firm
precision email marketing
bulk email marketing software
marketing bulk email
marketing email service agent
direct marketing email
email marketing 98
email marketing service
targeted bulk email marketing
discount targeted email marketing
email marketing secret closeout
email marketing technology
email marketing consulting
email target marketing
business to business email marketing
html email marketing
opt in email marketing software
global email marketing
marketing via email newsletter and mailing list
email marketing system
email marketing benefit
targeted opt in email direct marketing
viral email marketing
marketing with email
direct email marketing australia
replynet powerful email marketing tool
email marketing arabic
mass email marketing
email lab marketing specialist
email marketing career
email marketing etiquette
marketing phd email list
optinpro opt in email marketing software
email marketing research
3) Start clicking away; some of these companies are paying five and six dollars per clickthrough!
In most cases, Slashdotters would exhaust a lot of marketing capital that these companies have. In a few cases, the company may not have set a cap on their spending, and a few hundred thousand frivilous clickthroughs would bankrupt them.
It's brutal. It's legal. It's online activism.
What about Publisher's Clearing house? I have had the equivalent of two trees sent to my house? Which is more unjust loads of email or a couple of trees? Maybe there is a problem we aren't looking at
This is very wonderful. I guess I'm not really surprised. Relatively small close-knit communities often have good strategies for dealing with this kind of social problem. (Spam is best viewed as a social problem rather than a commercial or civil rights problem.) I'll bet there's not a lot of spam originating in Orkney either. Again, I'm afraid I don't see this system being replicated in the US. Too bad.
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
Well, spammers are fair.
They tested their penis enlargment metod on themselves.
Now, they _are_ huge dicks.
;-)
> Spam Under Legislative Attack in Europe
Finally, they are dealing with the REAL terrorists!
Within the EU harvesting e-mail addresses is already illegal thanks to the data protection directive. Selling those lists is also illegal.
People on slashdot have a definite problem spelling definitely.