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DoubleClick Gets Into Spam
keytoe writes: "Well, just when we thought everyone's favorite Privacy Snoop was starting to mellow out a bit, we discover this little tidbit. DoubleClick
is now branching out from the ad serving business into the SPAM business due to the fact that direct email marketing 'is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving.' Using DARTmail, you can now target your bulk mailings 'based on profile data.' I wonder which profiling data they're talking about. Perhaps, say, all
the data they've been collecting for years?"
Remember: complain about spam all you like, but the problem is that the spam is effective. Click banner ads etc. if you really hate spam, so that advertisers have a worthwhile alternative. Either that or kill the people who buy products from vendors who spam. The internet is too good of an opportunity to pass up; people will always want to make money off of it.
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
First line of their privacy policy:
No personal information is used by DoubleClick to deliver Internet ads.
So either their software doesn't include doubleclick customers, or the Privacy policy is wrong.
Course, if they've got any lawyers, both are probably right.
but hasn't this always been one of the biggest complaints about SPAM is that it is things you are uninterested in? I might not just blindly hit 'd' on everything that looks like spam if its actually things I'm semi-interested in...
After all, HP has no compunction about spamming their own employees to vote for the Compaq acquisition!
H-P Says Deluge Of Mail Designed To Gain Merger Support has all the gory details.
Geesh, Carly must be getting desperate (or has run out of HRT pills)!
"E-mail advertising, which is relatively inexpensive, is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving..."
According to whom?
Every single person I know complains about spam. Every single one of them deletes without reading the crap. Almost every one of them uses some sort of filtering/blocking.
And no, these aren't all geek-centric folks. Hotmail, yahoo, etc., all have basic filtering in place. Some UCE gets through, but most get filtered to their spam box.
Where the hell are these numbers coming from?
I realize that 1% of 10000 emails sent out is an acceptable return rate, but I wouldn't call it thriving. Show some solid proof that this is true and I will believe you.
Are people out there really this gullible? For pete sake, if I purchased all the products or services offered in spam, I'd be one highly educated, rich, successful, hung to my knee, always hard, in great shape, sexual tyrannosaurus.
And we know that ain't gonna happen.
Sent from your iPad.
Change your hosts file to block doubleclick and everything else:
Here's a good list.
Cheers!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Does this really surprise anybody? Doubleclick has been a bunch of capricious, dishonest bastards for as long as I can remember. They were one of the first names associated with evil cookie tracking practices(tm) all the way back in 1995 (and even earlier?), IIRC.
direct email marketing "is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving"
As someone pointed out above, I wonder what they mean by "thriving." A 0.1% response rate is not particularly "thriving" -- I think it's more because there is no way to punish them for spamming.
Wasn't there some kind of paper published recently that showed that, in one of those game-theoretical situations with two equilibrium strategies (everyone cooperating, or everyone backstabbing each other -- I think it's called the "prisoner's dilemma"), people tended to pick a cooperative strategy if the group was allowed to punish backstabbers? Because IMO, the situation with spamming is very much like the prisoner's dilemma.
I did an experiment one time, I blocked doubleclick and a bunch of other ad sites at my firewall. The problem was, there were so many sites it was like trying to stop a firehose with a bathtub stopper. There have been efforts like the RBL, but they always seem to start charging money. IMHO, this is not just because they are "greedy," it's because their operational costs are too high. And why? Because there are too many spammers. I think the only way to really fight spam is with a distributed solution. Here we'd run into all the network poisoning problems people worried about with gnutella et al. in the early days. Is anyone working on anything like this? Is anyone even talking about it?
It seems like we're getting spammed with spam stories nowadays, not just from slashdot but on zdnet and others as well. Is spam getting worse, or is the spam lobby getting more aggressive, or what? :-)
Just my $0.01
---Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise!
I called, and the person told me that is was a peice of software used only for Opt-in emailings and not spam. HAH. I told him that was quite funny. He told me there was no way to be removed from the lists because doubleclick dosn't do the actual emailing. What I'm hoping is that there will be an identifiable mark on the email that dartmail has, and we'll be able to block it.
1: They'll rethink their position,
2: they'll be forced to remove you, and
3: their phone lines will be clogged and they won't be able to make any sales.
If only we could get the same number of people to call that number that attack every site that's published on here... Of course, the circuit would probably overload are a relatively small number of callers.
I have a spam I need to send out:
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm a little biased because I work for a company that sends promotional email blasts.
That having been said, there is a huge difference between spam and the mail this service is sending.
Like it or not, at one time or another you didn't read a privacy notice and your email address was sold to another company.
When we send out 5 million+ mailings, about 2000 TOS (terms of service) or Spamcop violations will come back. What most of these morons don't realize is, there's both a link and an email address they can send mail to to unsubscribe permanently and effectively from our lists.
This won't get you off other peoples' lists, but it will get you off ours. Currently, about a 1/4 of our customers actually have a timestamp and IP address telling us exactly when and where these addresses came from. I would expect in the near future that everybody will start doing this.
Now, this isn't so say that all people are nice. That's not to say that people don't troll web pages and people don't fake mail-from headers. It happens. But there's also a lot of promotional mail that YOU OPTED INTO whether you realize it or not.
What I'm saying is, before labeling every piece of mail that you get as spam, try unsubscribing. And yes, I know that some unsubscribe links are fake. What are you going to do? There are also fake breasts and fake watches. Will you spend the rest of your life wandering around as a confused virgin? (well.. maybe the wrong place to ask this)
So, in conclusion, I know how fashionable it is to love linux and hate companies that are "out to get us" like Microsoft and DoubleClick, but this article is inflammatory and causing a lot of stupid people to post a lot of stupid comments.
If you want to get out some angst, try:
http://www.postmastergeneral.com/
http://www.e-centives.com/corp/
http://www.messagemedia
Or, combining microsoft AND email:
http://www.bcentral.com/
And lots of other companies (like mine) that send lots of LEGAL, NON-SPAM, promotional email.
Someone should create software to automatically update the HOSTS file of the millions of PCs owned by users who hate this but do not know how to make it stop.
This would undoubtedly cause Big Brother to take notice. I'm sure that they would gladly pay you off for a few hundred thousand.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Yes, yes. Sure. "Spam works." There are also other industries that turn a considerable profit too. Psychic teleservices and technological snake oil are two recent examples. They are both high-profit, highly visible / advertised... and under Federal investigation.
My server logs are full of relay attempts coming from cable modem and dsl users.
I think that they just start scanning for SMTP servers and then attempt relays. I see various attempts addressed to "test9483@hotmail.com" or such, probably from the open relay probe. Once they get a live one, the spam spews forth.
One could argue that anyone who operates an open relay should have their server overloaded, maybe then they would take care of their problem.
OTOH, it's entirely possible that it is you that they'd go after, rather than the legions of spammers.
Gordon.
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
-- J.R.R. Tolkien
Internet Explorer 6 will block cookies from referenced sites, such as DoubleClick. These guys had better act fast if they're after the profiles on that Windows user base, because what they've got is all they'll ever have...
Here's how DartMail works:
Suppose I am a DartMail customer. I have a web site, and a form on that page that my visitors use to subscribe to my newsletter. I collect all kinds of info from this form, from their email address, to street, to zip code, to whatever I feel like, and whatever people feel like submitting.
Then when I use DartMail, I can use the filter function to send the newsletter to whatever segments of my list I feel like. If I want to only send to people whose zip code is between 70000 and 90000, or maybe to all my subscribers who have indicated that "yes, I like puppies" when they filled out the form, then I use their filtering tool to do that.
That's all it is. Their press release is worded very poorly, almost certainly designed to piss off the paranoid freedom slashdot crowd, but in the end it's nothing new, and nothing terrible.
Who the heck buys anything off of spam.
You'd be surprised.
I recently spent several weeks doing my best to convince the people in my company's marketing department that they could not start sending unsolicited commercial email to potential customers.
My arguments were the familiar reasons why USCE is so evil. Their arguments amounted to "Everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?"
To this day, I have to tell my father-in-law about once a week that the "money-making business idea" he's found out about through a 'helpful email' is in actuality a get-rick-quick scheme, a pyramid scam or something similiar.
Scarily enough, Spam *does* work. The people in my marketing deparment all have degrees! True, that doesn't say anything about their intelligence, but they had enough common sense to pass enough tests, (or kiss enough ass) to get through college sucessfully. To the more stupid, or those unprepared to deal with blatant profiteerism-- quite a few Spams prey on the eldery, trying to get them to 'invest' their social security checks-- Spam is a deadly trap.
What's the saying? It was in an article on evolution a few weeks ago. Went something like:
"Natural selection favors those who are too stupid to use birth control."
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
How about an opt-in clearinghouse?
Users could register with the Doubleclick, the DMA, or the marketing agency of their choice with three flags set:
Any request to be placed on the list would be validated, by either a request received in writing (with signature), a telephone call (with recording archived), or an email with a randomly-generated token ("Someone entered this email address on the opt-in website. They were using IP address xx.xx.xx.xx. To confirm your opting-in, please reply to this email with '54771989981' in the Subject: line").
Any snail/phone/email list would be filtered through the opt-in list. If the address is not found on the opt-in server, no mail is sent.
Oh, right. The only people getting the ads would be the people who asked for it. The rest of us would be spam-free.
Can't have that, can we?
I'm afraid you're naive if you believe that, just as I once was.
How does DoubleClick verify that the lists in use are opt-in? And what penalties will they enforce if they aren't? If a DoubleClick customer spams via the DARTmail service, DoubleClick has just as much responsibility as an ISP does when one of it's customers starts spamming. Moreso, in fact, since bulk email is the stated point of the DARTmailservice.
As for the cost issues, there have been other companies who have charged (and continue to charge) a hefty price to act as an email marketing service provider. That didn't stop their customers from using it for spam.
How do I know? Because I've worked for an email service provider, and have seen it happen. Given DoubleClick's spotty history, there's no reason to think it won't happen with DARTmail.
That's opt-out, not opt-in.
Look, folks, no matter how much marketing drones would like to redefine it, the phrase "opt in" has a meaning in the English language. It means that the person took an affirmative step to get on the list and get the mail. It does not mean that they forgot to uncheck a button on a Web form somewhere, or that they signed up for something unrelated but were too apathetic (or too paranoid) to ask to be removed from the list when some huckster started bothering them.
If the user has to take action to get off the list, then it's not opt-in. If there's a check box on a Web form somewhere, but the default value is "yes, send the mail", then that's not opt-in, either. For a list to be "opt-in", the user must actually request the mail. And that's not common.
Capische?
I get periodic email with special offers, information, even (GASP!) updates to privacy policies from a number of major online retailers. They are few and far between (1 or 2 per business per week). They only come from the ones with which I do business. They always come from the same email address. This is not spam. Hell, most of these companies will gladly provide you with information on how to remove yourself.
Spam is an offer for a penis-enlargement pill from a randomly-generated Yahoo account. Spam is (as best I can tell) a Japanese porn site sample. Spam is a make-money-fast offer. Spam pulls tricks to hide the sender. Spam will send the same message to the same nonexistant address 50 times.
Pick your battles. If you fight them all, you will not win (unles you're one of those blackholes-will-save-us-all-from-evil types, in which case have fun on your small isolated island of the internet).
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
What you're getting may not be spam. Other people I know get spammed by some of the big retailers. I probably got about twenty spams from MicroWarehouse before we threw them in the filters.
All the stuff you're talking about adds to the annoyance, but it's not *necessary* for spam. For it to be spam, it has to be unsolicited, bulk, and email. That's it. If I didn't ask for it, and lots of people are getting it, it's spam.
Sure, Amazon is glad to tell you how to remove yourself; at one point, it was to send mail to "no-special-offers-ever-3@amazon.com". But they don't always honor removes.
They're in our spam filters because (and yes, I called and verified this with them) they have said they will *NEVER* ask for permission before sending their promotional mailings. You know that little "Send me special offers" checkbox most places have? They've said they won't have one, and that they'll spam until told to stop.
There are lots of companies that ask first. I do business with them, and I lose only a few sites that, frankly, weren't doing anything for me to begin with.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/