Slashdot Mirror
DMA to Control Spam by DMA Members
SiliconLawyer writes: "The Direct Marketing Association, the major U.S. tradegroup for companies using direct marketing techniques, will reportedly issue guidelines for how its members may and may not use e-mail as a marketing tool. Hopefully, this will influence other marketers toward more responsible use of e-mail. Details are on CNET here."
anything named The Direct Marketing Association should be sent directly to /dev/null
HURD - Hurd's Under Research & Development
Won't this be a little like the wolf looking after the chickens?
"We are still going to spam, but we wil spam nicely."
Spam is Spam is Spam!
This has to be a hoax. Next thing I know you'll be posting a story about how Microsoft is going to "specialize in computer security".
Har de har har.
Most of the spam you get isn't from the established businesses that would be members of the DMA. It's mostly from trailer trash. So this isn't really a big deal.
- Have a picture
Maybe I'm in the distinct minority, but most of my SPAM doesn't come from any real reputable marketing firm. Email sent from a company that uses forged headers so I don't know who they are doesn't seem very likely to be an upstanding member of the Direct Marketing Association. It's like saying "Look, we've outlawed guns, now criminals won't shoot people"... but that's a whole other can of worms.
Ad in classifieds: Pandora's Box (no box) $5
If you'd like more information, please send an e-mail to gullible@dma.org.
We promise this information will be kept private amongst are bajillion members and will not be shared with anyone else that doesn't politly ask.
Chaos, Mayhem, and Destruction: Not
I have worked for 2 companies that were DMA members and they were quite careful about sending mail, etc. already. This will have no effect on spammers whatsoever, they have a tendency to not pay thousands of dollars in dues to trade organizations.
E for effort though.
The DMA is all about self-interest, and their particular interest is enabling their members to put as much advertising in front of your nose as possible The only thing they're trying to accomplish here is to look responsive, so that the threat of useful legislation in the area will be less.
Oh, and as for those people foolish enough to sign up for their "voluntary" no-call lists for telemarketers, that's about equivalent to replying to spam; it only confirms that your phone number is legitimate.
Hmm...Direct Marketing Association...DMA. What exactly do they represent? Spammers, who uniformly sell crap. Thus, they could be the Direct Marketing (of) Crap Associat - thereby becoming the DMCA!
:)
Two evil entities, two similar acronyms. Coincidence? I think not.
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
You'll realize that the DMA's definition of "spam" is mass-mail from Somebody Else. About the only thing that the DMA policy requires of mainsleaze spammers is that they have "remove" addresses, and nobody trusts them anyway.
Bottom line: this is just another attempt to head off effective legislation by pretending "industry self-regulation."
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Typically, members of the DMA aren't the problem. It's some fly-by-night outfit that is advertising Herbal Viagra or Hong Kong Vacation Discounts or whatever -- people who not only annoy the people who receive e-mail, but usually do so illegally by using open relays, obscuring their true IP/Email address and so on.
Most DMA members understand that opt-in is the best way to keep a happy customer, though some companies might occasionally make mistakes or require opt-out instead, they're not as bad as the ones who won't be affected by this in the slightest. It may not be 100%, but those companies really aren't the biggest problem. I doubt any of the companies who have harvested my email address on Yahoo! and send pr0n spam (with pictures) are members of the DMA.
I think a death penalty for spammers is a good place to start.
DMA member Amazon.com said such rules are already in practice at the online retailer. Amazon spokeswoman Patty Smith said the company gives customers a myriad of choices related to receiving company communications.
"It sounds like we currently comply with all these rules already," she said.
Generally speaking, I bet most DMA members already have an acceptable spam policy - that, or a policy that needs only minor tweaking to make it policy-compliant.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
I'm sure the DMA wants to avoid regulations hitting their entire industry, but the facts are that they haven't been effective in the past. Junk faxes - including the infamous ones for more fax toner - are still regularly sent (I get a few every week at home). So, why should anyone reasonably expect anything they do to make a difference now?
It's still not clear to me how Direct Memory Access is going to keep my inbox spam-free. I mean, will hard drive manufacturers stop the CPU-less transfer of data from C:\ or /mnt/hda1 if they detect such strings as "You've already won", "Free trial offer", or "Wet sex"?
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Majority of DMA members are honest companies that use email marketing ethically - meaning opt-in messages, honoring unsubscribe requests, etc. This wont do anything to curb those "Increase Your Penis Size!" spams.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
When was the last time you knew of spammers that followed the rules?
Don't Tread on Me
In other news, US businesses agreed to stop savagely beating customers who are tardy in payment. Hopefully, this will influence organised crime towards more responsible collection policies.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I recently spent a few weeks trying to persuade my company's marketing bimbo that no, we could not send unsolicited emails to potential customers.
I used the simple expedient of repeating the reasons against spam over and over again until they began to sink in. I even threatened legal action... ie: I told them that people were starting to successfully prosecute spammers for big money.
Even than, I had to answer the question... "Why would this be illegal? I get this kind of thing all the time."
The sad thing was, until I finally convinced the executive VP to bring the hammer down on the project, I was forced to compose graphical HTML-ized spam emails. Thank god they never saw the light of day.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Second, who trusts the removal links?
Third, what prevents me from grabbing the removal database and using as a verified sucker database?
What would work is that DMA provides an email service that allows a member to submit a list and email to send to them, then they will test the address and if it is ok, then send it.
Fight Spammers!
look on their site. "you can get on our do not call list. up to 16 weeks later you may notice a decrease in phone calls. its five dollars to sign up." is this thing legit? if i were to actually sign up, how do i know i didnt just activiate a "this phone number is valid, spam it" function? (at the isp i work at we always tell our customers not to reply to spam emails for the same type or reason). the five dollars thing is the biggest insult of all. "i'll stop beating your shoulder in every morning for your milk money". why should i believe anything they say? they seem like big giant weasels. ick. ick, ick.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
In case the guys at DMA didn't get the memo, the cat's already out of the bag, pandora's box has already been opened, or .
The majority of the SPAM that's flying around the net isn't even from DMA members. It's all from con and scam artists.
Their move isn't going to change a damn thing in the short or long runs.
-
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Two ideas for handling spammers, inspired by User Friendly:
1. Next time you get a "501 compliant spam" that starts off with something like "This is not unsolicited bulk e-mail. Buy me.", flood their server with messages stating "This is not a denial of service attack."
2. The following poem seems to work well:
I got your mail and wrote you back
just so that you'd have no doubt
that if you spam me ever again
your router shall cease to route
I can just see those guidelines now:
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
What do you think that means?
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
All that this will do is demonstrate to Congress that we don't need government regulation; that the private sector will take care of itself...
... the trouble is, in this case, the private solution will be pitifull; it is, after all, being proposed by a group which claims that their right to call me during dinner time to sell me a time share vacation EVERY NIGHT FOR ABOUT A MONTH is protected by the first ammendment...
Even if the DMA are honest, their service can still be used to get good addresses. Consider the following scheme:
- Sign up with e-mps.org for $100.
- Get one of these 25,000,000 email address CDs
- Filter it through e-mps.org
- Diff the filtered results against the unfiltered input.
- Send out spam to the difference list.
This gives you a list of live addresses -- ones which get less spam than average, and hence which are more likely to read your tasty marketing message.Great service guys!
I have been long of the opinion that a good weapon in the war against spam and email abuse would be requirements at some level that emails be digitally signed with a certificate coming from a trusted authority like Verisign.
I believe this is the only way we'll ever be able to get the control mechanisms into place that will start reeling in the ever increasing abuse of the Net... accountability.
Ultimately I would hope that most email servers will begin putting into place policies that reject unsigned mail...
Anyone else agree with me?
mje0w!!!1!
I personally like the way ICQ handles messages and think that this could be applied to email as well. You could have settings that would require people to request authoriztion to send email to you. Everything else gets filtered. This would make spam a two step process for those involved and hence eliminate a vast majority of unwanted mail.
Granted one might be flooded with a deluge of autoriztion requests, but I suppose that could be set to a timing mechanisms whereas if a request was ignored long enough it's just refused.
Please feel free to poke prod or in any way disassemble this "idea"..or more accurately alteration of a successful method of communication.
but the preliminary comments are still way too ambiguous:
"We view spam as sending a commercial e-mail to someone with whom a marketer has not had any prior business relationship and as being sent to someone who has not asked for the e-mail," Cerasale said.
Alright, so if you sign up for a shopping site so that you can browse the contents, does that qualify as having a business relationship with a marketer? I'm pretty sure the businesses think it does. How about email being sent to someone who has not asked for the email? I don't think I've ever asked for an advertisement email, but I know that lots of times you have to scour every inch of the screen to find that little checkbox that says "click here if you don't want to receive promotional emails." The way the article reads, I'm not seeing much improvement here. These companies aren't really the huge spam problem in the first place, it's mostly the diet fad and porno sites, but still I don't think this will reduce their spamming, they'll just come up with new ways to trick you into "having a prior business relationship with a marketer" and "asking for the email."
~ now you know
I mean, my wife gets e-mails telling her to enlarge her penis and I get e-mail telling me to enlarge my breasts....
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
What's the point? A rough guess that 99% of /. readers believe this will do nothing to stop spam. I'm sure reading the article, most of you already knew what the responses would be. So why was the story submitted in the first place?
Who is SiliconLawyer anyway? Well, well, well, wouldn't you know, he's selling something on his website.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
So one of the ingenious ways they have of preventing spam is by posting a list of addresses on their website... anyone else see a problem with that? It is obvious to me that they don't really care about the spam problem, they just want to look like they are self-regulating so that congress doesn't interfere with their marketing plans.
Add the following to your sendmail.mc file:
/etc/mail/sendmail.mc > /etc/sendmail.cf
FEATURE(dnsbl,`bl.spamcop.net')dnl
then run
m4
Works for me...doesn't block it all, but it seems to help a great deal.
--It's Pimptastic!--
The problem with this is that the majority of the spam mailers do not belong to the DMA. They don't need to follow the rules under this organization. The ones that do belong to this typically (I didn't say always) have an easy opt out policy. Secondly, the corporate spammers have an entity that could be potentially held liable for spam whereas the individual spammers can move and hide easily.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Taking the cynical approach to reading this section in the article, we can expect that it will be acceptable for DMA members to send out the 'permission to spam' spam that so many spamming morons already do.
I'd like to see federal law that provides some disincentive to spam-sending critters. Making spamming illegal makes spammers into official criminals. I just can't see 'industry' self-regulation working very well when most spammers aren't even a part of any legitimate industry.
My poetry site welcomes the unusual.
They only send me stuff I would want to see, I get it no more than maybe 1-2 times a week, and it often includes a $5 off coupon or something.
Most of my bad spam is for absolute random crap or porn, with the same old line on the bottom informing me that the reason I'm being informed about all these Internet Cum Sluts is because I specificly requested to be spamed on their site or one of their partner's sites.
Plus, the latest thing is dating the message 3-4 days back, so you have to scroll back on your inbox to read/erase the spam. It stops the instant deletes by hiding it.
A DMA representative said the organization plans to announce the new rules governing commercial e-mail next week. The trade group, one of the largest in the United States with 5,000 members, includes such retailers as Amazon.com, Land's End and Eddie Bauer.
So what? Now Amazon and others will be able to send us email and claim they are within the guidelines set forth by the DMA. These guidelines are nothing more than a mechanism to allow them to legitimize their spamming operations.
I Heart Sorting Networks
How about not making it illegal to spam but make them buy a "license" to spam, and renew it every year... something like $100/yr even would weed out alot of the real clowns, but it wouldn't be so prohibitive as violating their rights.
OK, it's just an spur of the moment thought, so take it easy on me.
I Heart Sorting Networks
- Until I ask to be added -- don't contact me.
- When I ask -- presume it was not me and e-mail me a confirmation request.
- Only, when such a request comes back affirmative can you add me.
DMA, which wants to spam you, does not need to invent its own guidelines. They are already there -- by people, who know more about the Internet and e-mail, than, perhaps, the entire DMA put together...In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Precisely.
From the article:
> "If a company has conducted business with a consumer and has asked up front to send e-mail to that customer, then the message is not spam.
"We signed up Joe Slashdotter for our list. Joe Slashdotter didn't jump through our hoops to opt-out. But since we asked him to opt-out, it's not spam. Even though his mail bounces with a '550 - known liar^H^H^H^HDMA member - permanently blocked' message, he hasn't opted-out.
There must be something wrong with his machine. Better re-send the mailing a few dozen times an hour, just to make sure at least one gets through."
That'd be a great campaign slogan for a pro-privacy candidate: "If you are not with the public, you are with the telemarketers!"
Spokesman Easy-Q said:
Does this announcement fill you with any more confidence that the DMA?
In fact, there is a large difference between the DMA and drug dealers - as a general rule, if you tell them you aren't interested in their wares, drug dealers will lose interest and leave you alone.
www.eFax.com are spammers
This might be of interest:
RFC-3098 How to Advertise Responsibly Using E-Mail and Newsgroup
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
And this isn't about the fox guarding the henhouse. They have a larger objective. They understand, for better or worse, that when the voting public gets irate enough with spam that the legislatures will eventually get involved and pass a law to restrict spam and that no matter how good intentioned it might be, it will adversely affect ALL marketers, even those that are doing their best to be nice about it.
Its happened before. Someone screams about people pirating movies by breaking encryption, and now it becomes illegal to even try breaking encryption. Just as many movies are pirated as before, because the people pirating movies were already breaking the law. Breaking another one doesn't change anything. But a lot of otherwise honest citizens are now restricted in a new way.
People scream about all the child porn. So what do the lawmakers do? They pass a law that doesn't only outlaw the possession of child porn (which I agree with), but also anything that APPEARS to be child porn, so loosely defined that a girl that LOOKS under 18 wearing a bikini is now defined as child porn. I believe this was overthrown or amended in the courts later, but the point stands.
The DMA would rather make the effort to get the spammers into some type of compliant mode where the voting public is no longer outraged with them. Since I believe, as I'm sure they do, that this will not actually be all that successful, they at least want to make sure that they, and the companies they represent, can offer a clear cut, honest, consumer friendly way to market via email so that good intentioned, but unaware and misguided legislators don't do something silly like outlawing ALL marketing via email or passing laws that would make something as legitimate as signup mailing lists illegal. It COULD happen, and its better for all involved that the involvement of the government is minimal.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I heard that the first step in their campaign was going to involve sending out e-mails announcing the initiative to every business in America.
Way back when, every PC had a DMA controller built right in! We could transfer spam to
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
So for $100 buck a year every not clown company on earth can send an unlimited amount of garbage out to the world and cost everyone just as much as "I love you"? No thanks. How about a nice meat space analogy to explain things:
Spam is like litter. Throwing a beer can out the window is not a big deal until everyone does it. Then you live in a world full of trash. It's oppresive, costly and wasteful. Someone has to spend their time picking it up rather than doing something creative or useful. The internet is every bit as public a place as the highway system. No one's rights are violated when you keep them from trashing the world and no one's rights are violated when you tell them they can't fill everyone's mailbox with garbage. They are just as free to put that trash on their web site as I am to sell manure or let people haul it away.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
M$ Harvester intentionally mistakes gender to keep your clients ammused. This enables you to send mails that are actually read and ensures positive complience with your program. Our power users love it. We've gotten a number of complaints about this feature from other users however and we will fix that buffer overflow in Havester2002.
Thanks for your interest! Keep using the M$ Spam Set, the only spam development sweet that's fully integrated with the operating system from your desk to your client's desks. Our helpful newsletter is atatched below and you have been added to our list.
SpamWare 2002 newsletter 10,569 jan 25 10PM - Generated by Spambot on a Genuine Intel system!
NEW SPAM ASSISTANT
Tired of the same old Paper Clip (TM) Office Assistant (TM) that every program, even VI uses? We thought you were, because all of our usability tests showed people cursing and screaming at him before we integrated him into MSIE. Well, goog news! To compliment the dancing dogs and other custom denial of computing services our fine OS offers, we've made a special spam assistant just for M$ Spamware users! The new assistant not only gives you helpful hints on using spamware, it tells you clever details of your competition's use of Spamware. That's right the new Rat Fink assistant face conceals spyware (TM) to tell us everything you do while advertising our new product to you.
TWICE THE SPEED ENHANCEMENTS
By applying SpamWare patch #97497394a3874 (see link at end of article!) your harverster software will work twice as fast. That's because the patch duplicates entries so you can send that letter twice! Everyone needs duplicates, right? Everyone needs duplicates, right? You would not want your helpful message to get burried in your client's mailbox. Sending it twice, by having harvester record everyone twice, really makes that message stand out!
STEVE BALLER WINS PRODUCTIVITY AWARD!
Steve Baller, marketing wizzer extraordinary's revolutionary enhancment to SpamWare (TM) has netted him a major award! His pioneering work with "opt-out" concepts has been a boon to the Spamming Developer's Network. Go Team! Way to innovate.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
here's how the DMA protects you today. A link in the local newspaper jumps me to the DMA website, www.the-dma.org, with the big white box on the left to opt out of unwanted solicitations. the resultant page has internal links to click to opt out of (a) direct mail, (b) telemarketing, (c) spam. all three links go to a 404 page that says "We're sorry, this feature is currently unavailiable."
n dex.htm, instead and file a comment on the Proposed Rule to put the government into whack-a-mole mode on telemarketers. that's the best game in town today.
yessir, the DMA is shit hot for our privacy.
why not jump over to the FTC, http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/donotcall/i
if the FTC link is munged up, and I see a space in preview inside the word INDEX, just hit www.ftc.gov and click likely-looking boxes twice to get there.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?