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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?"
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.
Well, I'm happy to have filtered out everything doubleclick related with the help of junkbuster for the last few years.
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.
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.
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.
Won't work for me. I route doubleclick.com and every domain associated therein to 127.0.0.1 (and I run a private webserver) on my box.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
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
Don't pipe to /dev/null
I'm wondering if there's a method of rerouting incoming connections to port 25. Say if someone from a specific host tries to connect to port 25, your server acts as a transparent redirect, reconnecting them to their own mailserver so that they end up overloading themsleves.
I'm probably not thinking that through all the way, but one of the best methods, IMO, of countering spam is with methods that cause the spammer's mailservers to crash in mid-run.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
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!
Click banner ads etc. if you really hate spam, so that advertisers have a worthwhile alternative.
I see absolutely no moral obligation to provide advertisers with a "worthwhile" alternative. They aren't entitled to my eyeballs.
Perhaps I should also provide murderers with an alternative if I don't like being shot? Or provide con artists with an alternative if I don't like being cheated?
The day advertisers start advertising products for their functionality, durability, and versatility, rather than sexy-lifestyle-fu and blinking lights, I'll consider advertising an honest endeavour.
--G
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!
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.
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.
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
Bullshit.
If I opted into it, and didn't realize I'd done so (perhaps I'm the dr00ling AOLer you seem to think I am), then show me the opt-in.
That's what "double opt-in" (or more accurately, "confirmed opt-in", the "double" is your industry's language, trying to make it sound unreasonable) is for. Until you can demonstrate to my satisfaction that I opted in, it's spam.
>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.
So, because some tits are fake and some Rolexes are fake, and since I wouldn't give up feeling tits, or wearing a Rolex, just because I can't trust the owner of the tits or the seller of the Rolex, I should trust you? Holy non-sequitur, Batman!
The overwhelming majority of the claims of "click here to be removed" are lies. The overwhelming majority of the "You opted in" claims are lies.
So what I'm not gonna do is this: I sure as fsck ain't gonna trust your unsubscribe link, that's what.
And what I am gonna do is this: Find your upstream, and report you to them as a spammer. Don't want the 2000 TOS violation reports? Don't spam.
And if your upstream ignores those reports, what am I gonna do? Well, I'm probably gonna add your netblocks to my private blocklist. Don't want to be blocked? Don't spam.
> And lots of other companies (like mine) that send lots of LEGAL, NON-SPAM, promotional email.
How come (and I don't mean you specifically, I mean the general case over the past few years) every spammer always tries to re-define "spam" in such a way as "Well, whatever we do isn't spam."
If it's in my mailbox, it's unsolicited, and it was generated in bulk, it's spam, and I'll choose to either block the server that sent it, or report it to the sender's provider. What are you going to do?
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?
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."
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/
Hah! Ever since a Nigerian businessman dumped $38 million in my bank account and we split the proceeds 50:50 I have never bought porn or printer cartidges any other way
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/