Slashdot Mirror
Crazy Stats on Spam
gtaylor writes "An article in the Korea Times says that market research firm Emforce has established that South Korean internet users average about 1600 pieces of spam annually, summing to around 39 billion pieces of spam per year. According to the same story, Americans receive about 2500 pieces of spam per year." I figured that I get somewhere around 30-40,000 pieces of
spam annually. Lucky me... I get *this* statistic to be on the other
side of the bell curve :)
What I think would be an interesting addition to this would be to look at how much spam finds it's way onto newsgroups and weblogs such as this. My guess would be several orders of magnitude more, quite a waste of time and energy.
If they were typing randomly odds are one of them should have produced the next Hamlet by now.
-Space for rent
But the email said it was an exclusive deal just for me!
--
Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things.
To get the word out on how big of a problem spam is, the paper mass mailed the article to all users with a .edu, .com, or .org e-mail address.
I get between 20-30 messages daily, sometimes spiking up to 40+. I have had the same email address for 9 1/2 years but the problem only really began about 2 years ago. Then the network effect [URL?] must have taken effect and it skyrocketed. I subscibe to the usual privacy measures and don't give it out in newsgroups, return emails etc. but it is out there and they won't leave me alone. Waa!
why am I so lucky that I recieve almost no spam? In the past year I have recieved less than 25 pieces of e-mail spam.
I know that I don't advertise my email address on the web all that much and I don't use a free-web based service but that doesn't seem like great protection against spamming.
I am just lucky I guess.
since I really would like some free porn, email me at: garcia@localhost
What is spam? Unsolicited emails for unknown people? Unsolicited emails from companies you once did business with? Unsolicited email from companies you still do business with? Unsolicited email from relatives? How do you measure spam if you can't even define it?
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
The posters mention of being on the "far side of the bell curve" raises an interesting question - how is Spam distributed? Obviously, it's not a bell curve; a significant number of people are getting as much Spam at the submitter, and a significant number of people are getting none. If 5% of "users" (do they mean user/person or user/address?) are getting as much Spam as the submitter, and everyone else is getting next to none, than Spam is not nearly as much of a problem as this article indicates.
For example, as a person, I get a lot of spam. But almost all of it is going to my old account at the university of california (when I left I started giving the address to anybody who wanted one, for any reason.) However, the addresses I actually use get none.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
I've got so fed up of spam over the festive season that I finally got off my butt and installed Razor as featured on /. the other day. I've always been kind of against the complete black-hole idea, so Razor was very attractive.
So far I'm quite impressed. Easy to install (a couple of lines in procmailrc) and it's picked up about 50% of the spam I've received so far - importantly it hasn't flagged any legitimate messages as spam. Of course, I reported the other 50%, so that hopefully others won't have to endure them. The nice thing about the systems is that the more people that use it, the more effective it gets. It's not perfect, but in this mean 'ole spam-filled world, it's a good place to start.
You have to figure that is the average person is receiving 2500 spam emails a year, then the spammers must be getting enough feedback to make it worthwhile. If you think about it, you don't need a high rate, or even moderate rate, of responses from mass mailings since a small percentage could cover your spamming costs. What we need to do is find the small percentage that is responding to this mail and whack them over the head, otherwise it will never end.
By checking my logs for the last 24 hours, I have killed over 800 SPAMs for my 100+ users. If this is a 'typical day' in the life of my e-mail server (though I am seeing more around Christmas than ever), I am killing ~3,000 SPAMs per year per user. Not only does blocking SPAM give me a deep sense of personal satisfaction it gives me more time during my work day to do more important duties (like reading Slashdot) because I don't have users calling me to complain about the sex ads, mortgage offers and fly by night investment opportunities in their e-mail box.
I would love to see the US Congress require all e-mail marketeers to be opt-in instead of opt-out (with the Death Penalty for violators). However, I don't know if this would be effective as most of the SPAM coming in is from foreign servers (mainly Asian nations).
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I figured that I get somewhere around 30-40,000 pieces of spam annually. Lucky me... I get *this* statistic to be on the other side of the bell curve :)
The normal distribution, aka the "bell curve", has absolutely nothing to do with the distribution of the number of pieces of spam received annually. If anything, I would guess that the distribution has a long right tail: most people receive somewhere around the median amount of spam, but a relatively few users (such as slashdot readers) receive a much larger amount.
In general, numbers of anything do not just happen to be normally distributed. Central limit theory discusses the asymptotic normal distribution of sample means under suitable conditions, but generally very little can be said about the underlying population's distribution. Please refrain from talking about something having a particular distribution unless you know (or can test statistically) that it does. It's usually a sign of ignorance.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Wow, I've been reading so much spam latly, that I honestly read the headline as, "Crazy Sluts on Spam" at first!
...is about the penis enlargement spam.
I mean, how did they know to send it to me?
I Heart Sorting Networks
I can see why for somehoe with an email address shown on slashdot might get tons of spam, but the far majority of regular users could easily not get spam anymore. Here are the steps i did to not get spam EVER.
1. don't use your isp's email address. I don't know why, but those always get lots of spam. I think its because the isp gives you webspace, in a folder named from your username. So a spambot just needs to go to aol.com/users/ read all the folder names and tack on @aol.com.
2. have 2 email addresses, one which is for actual usage, such as communicating with friends. The other is just for all the things where you have to give a valid email address to sign up.
Thats all i did, and it works great for me. I guess a possible third step is that, if you get any spam, to ALWAYS hunt it down. look in the headers of the email, find where it came from (for example, aol.com) and forward the spam to abuse@aol.com, if that doesn't exist, forward it to webmaster@aol.com, root@aol.com, admin@aol.com, administrator@aol.com and any other names you can think of.
Only dead fish swim with the stream...
In the last three months, I've begun to get LOCAL spam, from stupid & amp; clueless companies that think that mailing spam equals "to be on the Internet" (equals making huge profits [yeah, I know better]). Now I'm getting around THIRTY daily spams, besides the pr0n I already get.
(10+30)*365 = 14600 spams per year.
Sigh...
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
He's supposed to be watching Lord of the Rings, or so he said at the end of an earlier article. I've been waiting for Taco's review, which will probably go something like this:
I laughed
I cried
I drove back home to get my wallet
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
How can spam possibly work for the spammer? Who is unsophisticated enough to think that any spammer can deliver what they promise? Especially when there are hundreds of messges all alike: how would a hypothetical idiot who believes in spam know which message to respond to? Am I taking crazy pills or something?
- Have a picture
Don't you mean "Microsoft Preferred Retailing Associates"?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I suspect that the actual number is several magnitudes of order lower; in fact, I'd guess that under 2,000 people are directly responsible for 75% of all spam (pure conjecture).
-bugg
It somtimes amazes me that politicians would pass up such an excellent opportunity to please the electorate at so little political cost to themselves - why not just ban spam? All of the ingredients are there:
1) Issue affects better educated citizens who are more likely to vote
2) No one likes spam. No one at all. Except for the spammers, that is
3) It's a magnet for all kinds of illegal activity
4) Unsolicited faxes are already prohibited - the technical and legal parallels are clear as day
And yet every time spam bills appear, they disappear, or are neutered, with lightning speed. Then I remember. This is America.
With the exception of what I have heard politicians refer to as "hot button" issues (abortion, gun control, school prayer), the sad reality is that almost nothing gets through congress unless someone is paying for it.
Congressionals and members of the executive are so deluged with paying customers that they seldom have time to worry about the real world. The rest of the time, rivals routinely block each others' attempts to pass any legislation as a matter of principle or habit or a continuous cycle of revenge, usually across party lines.
We're on the road to Tycho.
like, for example, a Spam Busting FAQ. Then you could link to it in the article, and users wouldn't feel compelled to post comments about Postfix, Spamcop, Razor, etc.
- Have a picture
I'm at about 20,000. 50 a day adds up quick... Most of it is duplicates too. Fortunately, about 90% are courtieous enough to put "unsubscribe" in the body so they get easily filtered.
Travis
Based on the e-mails I get, it would seem the advertising community has me pegged as a debt-ridden pervert with a small unit, sexual dysfunction, no education, and a penchant for get rich quick schemes.
I wonder how they know that. I must be an open book.
In many cases, it's easy to trace the spam back to the ISP from which it was sent, or to the ISP that's hosting the spamvertized website.
The problem comes when the spammer's ISP is unresponsive, either because they don't give a fsck about the problem, or because they're being paid well enough by the spammer.
SPEWS presents an interesting solution to the problem. In a nutshell, networks that harbor spammers get listed, and you can configure your mail server to use that list to refuse traffic from spam-harboring network providers.
The more people that use services such as SPEWS, the more likely it is that large, unresponsive ISPs (you know who you are) who also happen to have legitimate customers will receive mail from those customers saying "Hey! Clean up your act so people stop rejecting all mail from your customers! You've got real customers to service, not just spammers, you know!" and will be forced by market necessity to take their network abuse problem seriously.
If you're a user of one of these networks, and don't like the fact that some of your mail now bounces, look at it this way. You're living in a crackhouse, and your landlord is doing nothing to solve the problem. We're tired of dealing with your neighbors' rusty needles and used condoms. If your landlord won't clean up the building because he'd rather have a crack dealer's protection money than your rent, maybe it's time you moved somewhere civilized.
With the last article about spam that ran on Slashdot. I saw someone mention spamcop. I knew of the service, but never really checked it out before.
After reading most everything on their site, I figured I'd sign up for their pay filter service. Not really to stop the spam (that is just a nice added benifit), but just for ease of reporting the spammers.
Since signing up spamcop has probally stopped around 50 spams to me a day. Still about 5 a day slip through (and perhaps 1 false positive a day). I have reported all of the spam. I think I've recieved about 8 responces total to my reports, and I keep getting spam from the same places.
I'm pretty impressed with the service. At $0.50 a megabyte it isn't too expencive (but I shouldn't have to pay to not recieve e-mail). They are planning on going to a flat rate of $3 a month (which will be good for me as they estimate I'll be paying about $7 a month at my current rate).
Anyway, check it out if you haven't before, www.spamcop.net. At least report some of the spam you get using their free service to help build a bigger data base of open relays and other bad Internet company.
Yeah, make them read their own spam mail once for each person they sent it to. Or let's say twice. There has to be some punishment involved. ;-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"How much paper spam is distributed by the world's postal systems? I know my box is stuffed three times a week with crap I'll never buy. Is there a corelation between the cost/paperspam/volume and the cost/emailspam/volume?
Travis
* The U.S. is where the money is or * The U.S. is where the stupid people are
.org address .org domain .br addresses at a major ISP domain .br address at my work
.org address -> 3% .org domain -> 50% .br addresses at a major ISP domain -> 90% .br address at my work -> 3%
.org domain is the most widely known of them. My address e-mail is the second best. My addresses from the ISP
are the least known, and are the ones that received (percentage) the most spam.
Well, this is kind of interesting.
You see, I have, basically, 4 e-mail domains I use.
- 1
- 1
- 3
- 1
Even though something like 80% of the e-mails I receive is at my work address, I still have the following percentage of spam:
- 1
- 1
- 3
- 1
So, as you can see from my Completly Unacurate Statistcs Study(tm), it seens to me that your domain is more relevant to the amount of spam you receive then the country of it
Just to give an additional data, my
Something like 15 spams reach my e-mail boxes every day, which amounts for something like 5475 spams/year. Considering that my evasive measures and filters get something like 80% of all the spam directed to me, we can consider that I have around 30000 spams/year target at me. And I live in Brazil. So not, it's not something only Americans are subject to.
morcego
Spam sucks. Spam is a problem. Spam is a BadThing.
But don't push for SpamLaws. It is just an invitation for them to pass other stupid net-laws. Laws are regional, the internet is not. It won't work. The treatment will be worse than the disease.
Lawmakers do not understand the internet. Tell them to keep their hands off.
We are better off working out our own solutions - blackhole lists, filtering software, etc.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
...and I have almost 2400 pieces of spam. That's since Jan. 1 of this year. This is at work alone. I probably get more than half that at my personal account. So I'm averaging over 3600 pieces of spam a year.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
1) Jail spammer in special spammer's prison.
2) Give spammer an email address.
3) Publish spammer's address on USENET, preferably in an MLM or pr0n newsgroup.
4) Mail spammer, three times a day, an email message telling him his meal is ready, which he can print out to requisition his meal.
5) Deny spammer the use of filtering tools. If the spammer starves to death because he can't find his meal tickets among the spam, that's his problem.
I mean, why should he need a filter for his mail? Every spammer I've talked to - from trailer-trash to DMA executive - says it's easy to Just Hit Delete, right? It only takes a few seconds a day!
And I'm sure there are so many interesting offers in his mailbox, if he's not interested, he can always Just Hit Delete, right?
Ah, what I wouldn't give to be a warden in such a prison.
We run small webmail in sweden. 80000 registred users. We get over 100 spam/min which we catch on the connect. 100 spam/min which we catch before it is even sended to us and the rest get through. Don't really know how many that is but it's many.
We use only the rbl lists right now. Filters take CPU/mem and our E450 2*250mhz 1gb is running at 80% now.
It's an ongoing fight to catch those spamers. It seems to be getting worse at christmas too.
Most spam are "guessing spam" where the spammers are just guessing username@ourdomain.
If you are in states with so-called "anti-spam" laws, you can start taking legal action against spammers. Check out:
Sorry for the Washington-heavy links; it's my home state.
Unsolicited mass emails are never going to go away 100%. It frustrates me that so much time and energy and print/webspace is given to studies and articles that don't include what I would think to be the most important indicator of spam's level of infiltration - Signal to Noise Ratio. Sure, the "average" user gets xxx Spam per day/year/minute, but on what amount of traffic? If the "average" user gets 1600 spam out of 1700 emails, that's obviously very bad, but 1600 on 170,000 emails a year is a lot better. The poster's comment about being on the wrong side of the bell curve doesn't neccesarily mean he's getting more spam than most people as a ratio of spam-to-legit-emails. I would be most interested in studies that analyze the SNR, for in doing so I think we'll see (even more clearly!!) that there is indeed a spam problem that must be dealt with through enforceable legislation and/or international agreements.
As a side note, I have taken to giving out different email addresses for every place I'm asked for one, and using a "catch-all" from my domain, for example my email address here is slashdot@theoretica.net, but it might be goatpornmailinglist@theoretica.net or vic20overclockerslist@theoretica.net for other places. That way not only can I see what spammers got my email address from where, but I can also block a given address once its been overcome with spam - you know those places where you are asked for an email address and you just *know* you are going to get spammed senseless for providing it, but you must to get a login or pwd or whatever?
I also have OE move everything that's been BCC'd to me into a spam folder, mark it as read, and review it once a week.
-- "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge." (Charles Darwin)
They must have averaged in people with no e-mail address.
Sears quit publishing that catalog years ago. Now they just spam for customers.
- Have a picture
No, he meant "forwad." Why would he forward spam to himself? What are you, some kind of ignorant mud person?
- Have a picture
Spam is better described as UBE : Unsolicited Bulk Email.
Unsolicited : you have not opted in to receive that kind of information or never had a contact with the sender. The problem is when you have had a previous relationship with a company and that company sends you advertisement. My opinion is that they should be allowed to send you ONE ad and make the removal of your email in their database easy with that ad.
Bulk : email is sent in large quantities, to many people. The question is, how did they get your email ? Selling email lists should be illegal (except opt-in lists), but if your email is public (web, news) then no one can be forbidden to send you an email !
Note that all UBE is not commercial, it could be a virus or a bad joke.
Considering annoying emails from friends and relatives, that is a very different problem, I think, that should not be mixed with UBE.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
What I think would be an interesting addition to this would be to look at how much spam finds it's way onto newsgroups and weblogs such as this. My guess would be several orders of magnitude more, quite a waste of time and energy.
Oh, no, very little.
And you'll get absolutely none if you act now and buy my new SlashdotSpamBeGone, for just $9.95.
-Waldo Jaquith
Whack my grandmother at your peril, it's never going to end.
The ultimate fools are those who buy your logic and pour money into advertising. This works just as well for the suckers who buy "harvester" software as it does for folks who buy billboards. All it buys the purchaser is customer anoyance. The more advertised something is, the less likely I am to buy it. Unfortunatly there's a sucker born every minute who thinks "brand recongition" can be earned in some way other than solid performance, positive reviews and customer satisfaction.
Never trust someone who connives.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
The issue is, to many, a bit more complicated than that. Legislating away the powers of business can, and often does, have consequences far beyond what people initially understand. Granted, if the fly-by-night operators others have mentioned (selling investment opportunity, porn, and such - often on shaky legal ground) dissapeared, they won't be missed. But do you want to act in an irrational manner that would genuinely hurt legitamte business, in that one powerful tool of communication would be denied to them if the proposed law wasn't clear or too harsh?
If such a law were to be proposed, it would have to respect not only the rights of the individual, but the ability for the business to conduct itself in a fair and efficient manner. Many here have brought up some excellent points, involving opt-in only, always having a valid return adress and so on. Under a fair set of guidelines "spam" can be both containable and beneficial to us. Banning it all outright seems a bit overkill when we've actually done little (federally at least) to try to solve this problem, though I agree with you the attempts haven't gotten us far.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
If slashdot determines that this is so bad, how about slashdot automatically caching the page's text for everyone [who is stupid enough to not find Google cache]?
-bugg
Maybe the current govt crack down is targeted at the wrong set of Internet wrong doers.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
Starvation? They're spammers! Not murderers! Death's too good for them! ;-)
;-)
Incidentally, you left out the bit about making their meal ticket with an 'obvious' subject like: 'Make money fast', that varies on a meal to meal basis.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"abuse.net
cauce
Updates to this list are in my journal.
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
I can just see the next generation of Denial of Service attacks on the big webmail houses. The new IIS worms will start "joining up" to hotmail, msn, yahoo, etc. Then, they'll wander around any place where they can just so happen to "drop" the email address for the sniffing spambots!
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I would say I get on average 12-15 spam messages a year. Maybe I just know how to keep my email addresses from falling into the wrong hands?
You misunderstand me.
At this level, the people responsible for spam are the ISPs who don't terminate their spamming customers.
By refusing their traffic, sysadmins protect their own users, and encourage rogue ISPs to either (a) get legit, or (b) go bankrupt, as their legitimate customers desert them, or (c) stay in business, with no legitimate customers, serving spammers only, as part of a very large LAN. Either way, your users are protected from having to deal with the spam.
Perhaps another analogy might help.
The Taliban are not Al Queda. They did, however, in their role as the admins of Afghanistan, harbor Al Queda, by letting Osama, Inc "spam" the world with bombs and anthrax in exchange for his opium money. They repeatedly ignored abuse@ reports (diplomatic requests to turn him over, or stop executing their women in the soccer stadiums we built for them, or blowing up historical landmarks), because they decided that servicing their abusive customer was more important than servicing (say, by feeding, instead of shooting) their legitimate customers (the rest of the Afghani people).
One day, Osama sent one too many spams, abuse@afghanistan said "no, world, we won't terminate him, but here's an ignorebot ticket number" once too many times. And the rest of the world decided it had had enough of this crap, and we stopped politely asking abuse@afghanistan to clean up its mess (because they were clearly unwilling to do so), and started dropped all their packets on the floor until we got a new abuse@afghanistan in charge, who would take care of the problem. There's collateral damage to the @afghanistan userbase - right now, it must suck more than usual to be a user there - but shit happens. The message is that if you're a government, you ignore abuse reports at your peril.
Likewise, if you're an ISP, there comes a time when you have to decide who your customers are. If your customers aren't spammers, that's fine. Just get rid of your spammers, like the rest of the civilized 'net.
If you decide that your customers are spammers, that's fine too. Just don't expect to be able to deliver any mail to my users. They're my users, on my system, and your desire to support your spamming customer base in no way obliges me to cooperate by carrying your traffic. If you're an ISP, you ignore abuse reports at your peril.
And if you still don't get it - replace the word "spam" with "DOS attack". If you got nothing but Code Red probes and DDOS attacks from a netblock, and repeated reports to their ISP did nothing to make it stop (indeed, you told them it was coming in on 999.999.999.123, they said "We killed .123", and the next morning, you saw the same traffic on .124 -- all they'd done is move him by one IP address in order to protect him), wouldn't you be justified in saying "Screw it, I'm blocking the 999.999.999.0/24. Any legitimate customers in that netblock will just have to deal with it, or better yet, get a new ISP that isn't harboring network abusers."
Add to the the list of companies you respect - Microsoft.
:-)
Last night I upgraded to Money 2002 (Money is a fantastic product) and there were three unchecked boxes which, if checked, would have allowed me to opt-in to marketing from Microsoft and their partners.
I did not opt-in, but was at least impressed that I was given the appearance of an option.
I reconfigured our mail server a month or so ago, and, well, misconfigured it, so that it was an open mail relay on our DSL line. It took the bad guys about 2 weeks to notice; at which point we all of a sudden started getting hit with tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of relays through our server per day.
I'm only a part-time sysadmin, so I didn't realize what was wrong for a couple of days, just noticed that the mail server was slow...during that time perhaps half-a-million messages were forwarded by my machine. Unforgivable, I know. I didn't realize the threat; and most of it happened over a weekend.
On Monday, I spent a few hours finding out what was going on, and madly tried to cancel the messages by hand from the mail queue, before I did the right thing and installed the latest version of sendmail -- which by default doesn't relay.
For the next several weeks, I've been petitioning the various spam reporting lists to take us off of their blacklists. I have to say that everybody was reasonable in this respect. It took some time to hunt them all down, but I think I have them all. If you are doing this yourself, http://relays.osirusoft.com has a great resource for checking what lists your server is blacklisted with.
The only good thing to come out of this is that during the cleanup phase, spammers continued to try to relay spam through my site, and I was able to get several of those accounts cancelled by calling up the various email abuse departments at their ISPs. (My favorite was worldcom, I called them and they answered "Abuse!" I told them that I really wanted an argument...) The biggest disappointment was @home, who required a 1-week waiting period before shutting down a really high-volume spamming operation.
I was surprised how quickly my open relay was discovered, and then how quickly that information was distributed among quite a few (at least 40) spammers. Perhaps they watch incoming spam to see where it is relayed from; and harvest those to run their own spam.
Anyway -- my apologies to the community. It won't happen again.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Kornet.net?
Thrunet.net?
Dreamx.net?
Hananet.net?
I've SpamCoped everyone of these, complained to every address I could think of (abuse@, root@, help@, etc.), all to no avail. If I have to carbon copy 5000 e-mail addresses at kornet.net on each spam complaint to get them to stop spamming, I'm willing to do it...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
What, exactly, is "fair" about companies using my resources to tell me what they're selling?
If I'm interested in what they're selling, I'll seek it out. They have absolutely no right to send me unwanted ads. I already pay for my DSL connection, my ISP, and the phone lines the data travel over. If these spamming assholes want to play "fair" they'll reimburse me for the use of resources I pay for. Otherwise they can go fuck themselves.
-Legion
Your response is well considered and a pleasure to read, but I must disagree with you that it is a complicated issue for anyone. Unlike many other regulations our country has lately considered, there is no gray area, and no real consitutional complexities. It is utterly simple.
It is trivial to determine when a communication is unsolicited: the test is whether you had prior direct, 1st party contact with the sender, in which you requested the message. Then, to my mind:
* If the receiver pays for the communication, communication must be solicited by the receiver!
* If the sender pays for the communication, then let the sender go to town - it's their nickle.
Yes, it is cheaper for me to receive email than to receive a fax or a cell phone call. But it is not free!
Of course, I am all for compromises such as federally enforced "universal opt-out" lists, federally enforced uniform header/subject identification, or any other method by which I can effortlessly, and with a single action, no longer receive any unsolicited commercial email. But anything less than that (i.e. opt-out) is nothing at all.
We're on the road to Tycho.
It's amazing how many people fail to understand how simple this is. HINT: Unsolicited faxes are already illegal. This is the only reason anyone has any fax paper left in the tray.
Unlike many other regulations our country has lately considered, there is no gray area, and no real consitutional complexities.
It is trivial to determine when a communication is unsolicited: the test is whether you had prior direct, 1st party contact with the sender, in which you requested the message. Then, to my mind:
* If the receiver pays for the communication, communication must be solicited by the receiver!
* If the sender pays for the communication, then let the sender go to town - it's their nickle.
Yes, it is cheaper for me to receive email than to receive a fax or a cell phone call. But it is not free!
Of course, I am all for compromises such as federally enforced "universal opt-out" lists, federally enforced uniform header/subject identification, or any other method by which I can effortlessly, and with a single action, no longer receive any unsolicited commercial email. But anything less than that (i.e. opt-out) is nothing at all.
We're on the road to Tycho.
A pathetically low percentage of spam winds up in actual peoples mailboxes, most of it is undeliverable (mailboxes that I discontinued in 1995 are still on the spammers "Verified! All Fresh! 10 Million addresses" CD-ROMs).
Then, of course, even if a sufficiently gullible person is reached by the spam, that person has to feel a need for the product or service. TV Shopping Channels are surprisingly effective, but not effective enough to turn every person watching it into a buyer. Spam is no different in that respect.
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.
This is targeted advertising and if the email is on your site then I think it's legitimate ...
Men are born ignorant, not stupid; they are made stupid by education. Bertrand Russel
perhaps half-a-million messages were forwarded by my machine.
Interesting. Could you tell how many protest from the spammed were addressed to you? Were they polite?
I ask because sometimes I think I am the only one who complains (politely) to the open relay. I received a nice apology once.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Actually, I do have my email addresses for the contact, billing, and technical for 5 domains and haven't had any problem. I registered directly with OpenSRS (I happen to work for an ISP who resells domains though OpenSRS)