Slashdot Mirror
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.
From Doubleclick's Website, the number to call for information about DARTMail is 866-459-7606 (toll free). Feel free to give them a call and give them a piece of your mind. Remember to be polite, you'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. If enough people call to complain and ask to be kept off all of their lists, the following will happen. 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.
A good /.ing should show them how we feel about this, but for god sakes, remember to disable your cookies before you go there...
Well, I'm happy to have filtered out everything doubleclick related with the help of junkbuster for the last few years.
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.
... anyone see any mail from it yet? I want to know what new host to add to pipe directly to /dev/null.
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
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...
I for one am looking forward to the "Nu-Spam". Since I have a B.S. already, I'll get ads from only the finest in unaccredited masters degree programs. Also, just think of the targeted pr0n. No more brunettes thanks, only the red-headed barely-legal college girls will send me invitations to meet them and their roommates on-line...
Just wait till some crappy band steals your nic.
I mean, what do you think they are collecting people's surfing habits information for, if not for spamming/selling later?
It's not like DoubleClick is monitoring how many times per day people go to Monster or HotJobs job board, and how many resumes they have sent, to determine how desparate they are to find a job, and then alert the President to send them a bigger check in the mean time so that they can survive^H^H^H spend and contribute to the growth of the economy?
Well, at least now if I recieve 50 porn emails, those emails will be specifically targeted to my porn needs, ensuring that I'll be able to find the porn I want faster and with greater reliability. When a company that destroys your privacy has your best interests in mind it really warms your heart.
"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.
127.0.0.1 localhost.nmsu.edu localhost doubleclick.net
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
Maybe that's no better and I could be wrong but there's nothing in the article to suggest that they are selling actual personal data of any kind as part of this deal.
Wow, 22 comments and no one read the article. It talks about how it's designed to help segment your customers -- while this probably has evil applications, the releases DC is sending out seem to be targeted to, say, Amazon-type companies that want to send emails to their own customer base.
-- q
Since Doubleclick is now turned 'spammer' Does this mean that their entire subnet will be blacklisted from the net? :) I suppose, when I start getting spam from them, I can just e-mail their upstream provider (probably UU.NET) and have them pull the plug. No more spyware banners, no more junkmail, and all is well in the world! :)
Personally, I think this is an excellent move! WTG DoubleClick, spam yourselves into oblivion, please!
The (Hopefully) Great Slashdot Blackout
Does this mean I'll get a ton of ads for Visual Studio XP, since I keep seeing their banners on OSDN?
sulli
RTFJ.
E-mail advertising, which is relatively inexpensive, is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving, and has become a key area of focus at DoubleClick.
I love the spin they put on this. They make spam out to sound like the latest & greatest form of advertising.
It's SPAM. Not advertising, SPAM. Just because it is "thriving" does not give them the right to spam us.
In addition to helping advertisers segment their customer data to launch more targeted ads, DartMail 3.5 also helps track customer transactions in more detail, recording such information as the value of a given purchase and whether it was made in direct response to an e-mail transaction.
Invasion of Privacy becomes "Track Customer Transactions in Detail". Amazing.
After all, that's JUST what we want...for people to be able to track us even more. When did invading our privacy become a good thing??
The internet is NOT Television, and these marketers need to stop trying to treat it like that. They can NOT force us to look at ads, no matter what they do. And dumping unsolicited emails on us isn't the solution.
Until these guys get it, I suggest 2 things:
1) Block doubleclick (wildcarded, of course) on your router/firewall.
2) Make use of SpamCop.net.
Doubleclick, to be in the business, will have to abide by the spam laws that states have already passed. This means Doubleclick will be one of the few groups I get spam from that actually add the ADV: prefix, which makes filtering them braindead easy.
It doesn't appear to be spam-tastic at all -- they talk through the whole thing about newsletters/customer bases/permission-based marketing.
You guys really want to go after a spam tool provider, go nuke Earth Online, or any of the guys who produce stealth emailers.
-- q
I don't see that you can say "Spam is effective" with a straight face.
Canter & Siegal, the original Usenet spammers, gave it up after a year or so. Sanford Wallace, one of the most unrepentant spammers, with a history going back to fax spamming in the late 80s, gave it up. AGIS networks, host to Sanford Wallace, went broke. You can't name a single major company that spams. The only people who spam are pyramid schemers, shady pseudo-pharmaceutical marketers, online pornoographers and internet casinos.
Spam isn't effective, at least not for someone on the right side of the law - it generates too much ill will. Spam me, for instance, and I'll complain all the way to the top, making clear that I won't buy your product or service again.
What spam does have going for it is lack of control by market forces. Conventional ads, tee vee, newspaper, billboard, etc, all get paid for by the advertiser up front, before the consumer makes a choice about buying the product. Those ads must be effective, and must not offend too many potential customers, or the advertiser won't recoup the ad costs, much less sell any product. The consumer who chooses to buy a conventionally advertised product does end up paying the cost of the ads, but only after seeing or hearing the ad.
This isn't true of spammed ads: everyone who recevies a spamvertisement pays some amount for it (dial-up time, CPU cycles, disk space allocation, etc), whether a spammed ad convinces them to buy the product, or revolts them so much they'll never buy from the spammer again.
The Invisible Hand of the marketplace only acts very lightly on spam - spamvertisements can be as lurid and grotesque as possible because of this. That's why we need laws against spamming - market forces don't apply.
Spamming is theft, plain and simple, and spammers must be punished.
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!
My face isn't the one in question. I have no idea whether or not spam is TRULY effective, because I don't have any first-hand experience. However, it may interest you that in the text of the Slashdot post itself lies this:
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.'
Clearly, regardless of your intuition or otherwise, Doubleclick thinks that spam is more profitable than banner ads. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to remember that while YOU personally may not respond well to spam (or anyone you know, for that matter) geeks generally do not. In fact, geeks tend to get really overexcited about the issue (for example, claiming that it is theft "plain and simple") but most people couldn't care less, and even seem to be buying spammed products. All of your postulations are all well and good, but the only reason to advertise is to sell more products, spam has been around for a while and its presence is only growing, therefore spam must be an effective way of selling products. That is what is plain and simple.
visit the hwky website for a lyrical genius infusion.
I dunno, but perhaps it is time to just start banning IP [subnets] completely. I'd hate to sound like some egalitarian asshole, but with the exception of a few friends, I wouldn't miss anything coming from the IP addies owned by ATT, and sure as hell not miss any of the excrement that is AOL.
Stuff like doubleclick I wouldn't miss either . . .
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
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.
About a year and a half ago, DoubleClick announced that they had acquired NetCreations, a mailing list company run by an old friend of mine Rosalind Resnick, for a rediculously large number of millions of dollars. NetCreations had been in the business of running opt-in mailing lists. This didn't seem to attract a lot of interest at the time.
The deal fell apart after DoubleClick's stock price tanked, and NetCreations sold themselves instead to Seat Pagine Gaille.
So, they've tried this before, and it failed to gel. Let's hope that it fails again. The threat of targeted spam is far greater, I believe, than mass-mailed spam, because it's much more difficult to filter out.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've been blocking all mail from them for going on 2 years now. I also quarentine all mail with "doubleclick.net" in the body. Works like a champ.
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.
Clearly, regardless of your intuition or otherwise, Doubleclick thinks that spam is more profitable than banner ads. ... but the only reason to advertise is to sell more products, spam has been around for a while and its presence is only growing, therefore spam must be an effective way of selling products. That is what is plain and simple.
Oh, please; Are you seriously asking me to believe that any business, especially "natural viagra" spammers, pyramid schemers and an ad company like DoubleClick actually use some kind of analysis to decide what to do? You might as well ask me to believe that Pro Wrestling isn't rigged. It's pretty clear that DoubleClick's backed into a corner by the low rates that people will pay for crappy banner ads. DoubleClick is grasping at straws in the only business they know: lying to people.
Besides the issue of businesses making decisions on minimal data, you should read what I wrote: spam may be around, but whether the amount of spam is growing or shrinking has little to do with selling products. Your intuition that a relationship exists between spam quantity and selling products is demonstrably weak. Read the article to which you respond.
I am a bit familiar with DARTMail (actually used the product), and from what I know, it does not use the vast amount of information that DoubleClick has for it's targeting - instead you upload all of your site's registration data, and target based off of that. It allows you to put together different emails for different groups of people, assembling HTML emails like building blocks.
The real murky area (I felt) is that what they do with the information once they have it... Do they integrate it in with their master list, getting even more info? I was assured that would never happen - that all of the info uploaded would be segregated, but I never read (or had access to) any of the fine print.
Now DoubleClick and all related networks can end up on the various blackhole lists, so we can start seeing their advertisements and cookies disappear! Rock on!
GENUITY (NET-GNTY-199-92) GNTY-199-92
199.92.0.0 - 199.95.255.255
Double Click, Inc. (NETBLK-DOUBLECLICK3) DOUBLECLICK3
199.95.206.0 - 199.95.209.255
Cable & Wireless USA (NETBLK-CW-10BLK) CW-10BLK
208.128.0.0 - 208.175.255.255
Inflow (NETBLK-CW-208-169-16A) CW-208-169-16A
208.169.16.0 - 208.169.23.255
MessageMedia (NETBLK-NETBLK-INFLOW-MMEDIA) NETBLK-INFLOW-MMEDIA
208.169.22.0 - 208.169.23.255
Smartin Designs.
;-)
The lameness filter won't let me paste the list in here and post but the hosts blocking list they have there is a good 400k long. I use it religiously.
Here's a hint for the less informed: In windows9x/me edit the file \windows\hosts to allow you to redirect sites like doubleclick so they won't receive their web bug, cookie and other ad-tracker data. The text to insert can be found at the above site. For win2k/NT it's in \winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.
In linux, the hosts file is in \etc\hosts.
Go have fun
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.
To tie into the previous stories, how about creating a profile that includes the following people.
Are unemployed
Use the Internet
Claim to own their own business
Spent time in a dungeon in Europe for sending unsolicited e-mail
Discovered that technology has reduced the response rate to their mass mailings to near 0%
We take this profile and tell DoubleClick to mail every piece of spam to people who match all of these criteria. If all goes correctly, the number of addresses to be hit is one, and that lucky person is Bernard Shifman.
...I'll continue to have an inbox filled with pr0n spam. How is that news?
Hopefully, it will all come from the same domain or sender so it's easily filtered.
For your firewalls
1 .104/21. 225.0/240 4.253.104.0/23
199.95.210.0/24
-------------------
204.176.152.248/21
206.65.181.96/22
206.65.18
63.85.84.0/24
204.176.177.0/24
208.211
208.203.243.0/24
204.178.112.160/19
2
216.230.65.64/28
63.77.79.192/27
192.65.80.0/24
128.11.60.64/27
128.11.92.0/24
199.95.206.0/22
Actually, I know people who DO spam, and it is VERY effetive for them. Actually, market forces DO apply. To get the point at which you can safely spam without being shut down by a provider, you have to spend a LOT of money to get tier 1 or 2 bandwidth, and a safe server. Any mom & pop shop that tries to spam is shut down sooner rather than later. But if you have the money to buy the right bandwidth in the right location, you still can make quite a bit of money spamming.
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
Dearest Timothy & Slashdot crew, Can we make an effort to get your terminology up to speed? I find it troubling that you guys tend to try and get us all worked up by using misleading phrases in the headlines. SPAM = unsolicited email The service these guys are offering is solicited when users download software, fill out magazine subscriptions, etc. I don't see where this is spam. Is all email businesses send to obtain clients considered spam by slashdot? I hope not. I would hope we were a bit more educated than that.
To my fellow readers, please don't fall for Timothy's silly attempt at enraging you. Go ahead and mod me down, but I just disagree with misleading posts. They do nobody any good and a company's image some harm, and for no good reason. Victor
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...
DoubleClick will also be providing their own SPAM blocking software which for $50/month will prevent their DART-mail customers from bugging you. This is expected to be the real profit-maker.
Spamazon is "a big company". I've gotten spam from Dell, MicroWarehouse, Spamazon, Excite, Microsoft, and RealNetworks.
The key is that they're all scum.
Spam is very *cost-effective* - but that's not very effective in absolute terms. As long as backbones are willing to look the other way as long as the bills are paid, spam will be a problem.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Though I realize double click could care less if SPAM works or not, just as long as companies think it does and they pay double click.
So essentially double click will spam up, while advertising to companies that their SPAM works.
Personally I have NEVER received one single SPAM email that I had even a remote interest in.
For instance, you sign up for a mortgage with a company, and get SPAMed for some 'investment opportunity.' What does the one have to do with the other?
Not to mention phone spam, and fax spam. I get more phone spam than anything. They have ruined my phone totally. Ever day I gotta run downstairs to grab the phone and look that the number is 'out of area' before I Ignore it. They should pay for the energy I burn up and down the steps. My fax machine fires up, only to be some real estate spam. My postal mail box is always busting fresh with spam from the big chain super markets and credit card applications. My olfactory nerves are spammed as I drive by Steve's soulfoud, but that kinda works...As the final insult, my email is spammed.
Watch out, there will be spam on the one dollar bill next...
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!
Well, a couple people have pointed out that DARTmail is NOT a spammer product. But those people are in the minority so I'm going to drive this home:
It's a premium email delivery engine. It is much too expensive for spammers. This is for publishers who maintain newsletters and house advertising lists. Hell, it's too expensive for a lot of publishers for that matter... Anywho, DoubleClick, like most email providers, is extremely uptight about their clients using opt-in only lists (albeit IIRC I think they still let you get away with pre-checked single opt-in). I know this personally from having them investigate mailings that had high rates of bounces and unsubscribes (it was a list import problem and the primary key wasn't properly parsed from the email address - I'm not a spammer!).
Plus, there is nothing new about this - if you read the article, you see that it says this is DARTmail 3.5. DoubleClick has been in the email tech biz for a couple years now. v1 was scratch built, v2 was when they bought Flo, v3 is integrating Message Media's technology.
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?
If you don't mind, I'd like to condense most of what you said here and use it in my stock spam-reporting boilerplate. Well-said, and righteous.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I've instructed Mozilla to warn me before accepting any cookies, and anytime a banner ad tries to set a cookie on my system, it gets denied and that banner ad site gets added to my filters.
I don't quite understand why Mozilla doesn't honor the "only from originating site" flag, but in a way I appreciate it - a banner ad that tries to set a cookie is like a houseguest who smokes...
www.eFax.com are spammers
Hades - February 25, 2002 (AP) - Dante Alighieri returned from the dead today to appear at a press conference announcing a new Circle of Hell component to accommodate Internet Spam providers. The new Circle, 8.5, will house spammers and marketers who have been deluging internet users with allegedly helpful emails, up to hundreds per day. "We thought long and hard about simply tossing them into Bolgia 9 or Bolgia 10," Alighieri said, "they are certainly Sowers of Discord and Inpersonators, but they also have elements of Alchemists - trying to turn base electrons into gold. For these reasons, it was simpler to give them their own new Circle - 8.5, than to try and winnow out the separate elements." Alighieri's assistants at eDante Enterprises reiterated the choice - saying "We were going to implement a system of distribution into the existing Circles, based on the contents of the message headers, but we feel they deserve their own place - right near the edge of the pit. Plus, have you seen some of these headers?" The existing denizens of adjoining Bolgias have 90 days to file protests, which eDante representatives say are already coming in fast and furious. "The most common complaint has been 'eeeeew - spammers?!' and that's mostly from the Evil Counselors in Circle 8 and Traitors in Circle 9." Doubleclick, and Cantor and Siegel were unavailable for comment.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Tried going to the link but no avail. Then I realized my .hosts file! Doubleclick is set to 127.0.0.1 :)
Can anyone mail the actual text?
Oh, right. The only people getting the ads would be the people who asked for it. The rest of us would be spam-free.
That's not a problem, that's the ideal situation. People who hate Spam aren't going to click. Believe me if Spammers could filter out those who absolutely would never click they would, it would allow them to send more mail to those who do follow links.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
SmartIn Designs has an excellent list as well, one of the best host-blockers I have come across for this and I did used to maintain my own. DoubleClick, be gone.
Several formats and levels of protections are available, so check it out even for the docs. You'll probably want to trim it down a bit... the largest list is pretty damn large.
Anyone know of any other ones out there? I think using a CVS-like system to maintain a decentralised host blocking list could be a good idea... anyone trying this already?
<!-- DHTML / JavaScript menu, popup tooltip, Ajax scripts -->
But, this sucks because if my name is on 300 lists than I have to opt-out of each one individually. Why should I have to go through all this hassle to prevent someome from sending me something that I never asked for to begin with!?!?
We should right to our leaders and representatives to ask them to pass laws against this kind of thing. Double Click should work on the "Opt In" principle instead. Don't send a goddam thing unless I specifically request it!
They're marketers. You should be surprised that they manage to avoid choking to death on their own snot.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You do NOT "opt in" to getting continuing mail when you make a purchase.
In meatspace, this is why I usually pay cash and never return warranty cards.
But on the net (and on the phone) your only option is paying by credit cards, and I've so fscking tired of getting spam for YEARS because I once purchased a christmas gift that I'm actually cutting back on my online purchases because of it.
If I make a purchase, you can get away with ONE follow-up catalog. But that's it - I don't want to be on your mailing lists, I don't want to be shared with your affiliates. You can get away with an opt-out box, but only if it's well-placed and visible - no 4-pt fonts buried on a page two links away from where I provide my information.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
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."
>
> That's not a problem, that's the ideal situation.
Oh, I agree. Unfortunately, it is a problem if you're the DMA or some other bunch of marketing goonz.
Historically, the DMA's "problems" seem to get fixed by Congress with greater frequency than our "problems".
This may be changing - the FTC has asked for a national do-not-call list. Although it's opt-out, it's enforced by law, not "voluntary compliance on the part of the DMA". See, for instance, the FTC's press release on the FTC proposed national "Do Not Call" registry.
In typical fashion, DMA lobbyists are out in force to try and shut this one down. With overwhelming grasroots support for such a proposal, Congress might not bow to them this time. Perhaps a letter to your Congresscritter might be in order?
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/
Everyone,
/. editors would not read through the page to realize that this is not spam.
If you actually go to the page and look, you will see that this is OPT IN. It's not spam like the submitter said. Everyone is going off the hook without looking at the page and seeing how it works. It works just like Post Master Direct.
Webmasters can sign up, people join different lists (OPT-IN) and then they get emails from advertisers, and the webmaster makes some money. The people opt into getting mail about things they are interested in, and can opt out at any time.
This is NOT spam. Spam is when you do not authorize the person to send you mail.
From their Web page:
"DARTmail provides technologies such as List Generator and Preference Center that allow your subscribers to opt-in and manage their subscription through branded, seamless Web forms integrated with your Web site."
Get your facts straight before posting some crap that is not true. It's sad that the
You're right about not convincing the bad ones, maybe, but just once I'd like to have a chain of evidence stretch taut, seize, and throttle a spammer, who will then hang for all to see over a pit fuming with fire and brimstone.
:)
The apathy you describe, Yes, is the usual reaction, but having boilerplate (which I meant in the second sense you name) to fire off saves me a lot of angry typing
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
If you're on a Mac, I recommend OmniWeb, which has excellent cookie-dropping and URL filtering features. My default cookie action is "accept, drop at end of session", and I can set the sites whose cookies I want to keep. (connect.apple.com, slashdot.org, and about half a dozen others.)
\ .doubleclick\.net/
In OW, you can write up a list of regex's to filter. I haven't seen anything from
/ads\..*\.net/
/ads\..*\.com/
/*banner*/
/.*
for quite a while now.
It's pretty sweet..
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."