Slashdot Mirror
Spammer Sues List Broker
BuckMulligan writes: "This article describes a lawsuit brought by a spam company against a list brokerage warehouse for selling e-mail addresses of persons who didn't opt-in. What this means is that those marketing lists created by data brokers aren't even accurate enough for sending spam."
Spammers can sue people? That just aint right. Regardless, if you buy 10 million e-mail addresses, look at how many of those addresses are going to be canceled, or changed in just one day. Our ISP has 400 users, and we change usernames, add, and remove users daily. And thats just a 400~ customer base! Maybe if the list makers get sued, they'll have to adhear to the actually 'Opt-in' theory! Then maybe I'll stop getting stuff about Viagra that I don't need, Hair loss products that I don't need, Viacream *shudder*, Ferimones, and the other list of absolutely stupid shit that I can't believe anyone would buy, let alone try to sell! But thats just my opinion.
Can all fish swim?
"Would you like to recieve email messages from our *valued* business partners?"
How many grandmas couldnt even read that small print?
I sig, therefore I was.
I suspect that most "Opt-In" mailing lists are derived from people who click through an online service agreement without reading the whole thing or the privacy policy.
The real trouble comes when trying to determine which of the spam that says I can opt-out actually means it, and which of the spam is just harvesting/validating my address.
Thankfully, most of the web sites I use only send me their own spam (which I generally don't mind, especially if I can tell them to stop) but occasionally I get one site that sold my name to a list and voila... instant opt-in on a technicality.
That's why I normally make a new email alias when providing my address to a new site so I can at least attempt to see who sold my name in the first place.
Slashdot comments... splitting hairs since 1997.
It'd be interesting to have an agency that you could send your e-mail address and preferences to that could be checked by potential buyers of e-mail lists.
It could serve as a free service to the people who care enough to act on their need not to recieve spam. Any reputible company would check their databases with the 3rd party database and remove the e-mail addresses of people who opted out of all spam. Maximizing their direct marketing costs of sending out mailings.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
For an explanation of why you can't "buy" an opt-in list, ask Google about "Nadine mailing".
Yes, this is off-topic. Mod me down if you must.
Am I the only one who forsees a day when URLs and hyperlinks as we know them are superceded by Google search strings?
The Google database changes dynamically, of course, but that's currently a small problem. If I'm looking for info on the IBM FAStT700 disk array, as I was this morning, I'm a lot more likely to type "ibm fast700" into Google than I am to navigate through IBM's maze of a web site.
If I don't know exactly what I'm looking for, Google can usually help me find it, or at least something sufficiently close to it to get by.
But if I know exactly what I'm looking for, but don't know where to find it, Google is even more helpful.
Who needs URLs anymore?
Another bit is the web sites with an unverified opt-in -- that is, anybody can type in an e-mail address and it's considered as an opt-in without sending a confirmation request.
Mandating
a) a confirmation request sent via e-mail, that requires POSITIVE confirmation (the response must include a unambiguous not-readily forged reference to the original message) before "real" addition to the list
b) a simple, obvious, free removal mechanism, which works within a reasonable period (say, 48 hours?)
would help.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Or... They use what seems to be a common technique.
Step 1: Forge "from" so that bouncebacks won't be an issue. Step 2: Use software to auto-generate half a million email addresses using a dictionary and random "common" numbers such as dates, "69", "1", etc. Step 3: send email. Sit back and enjoy not having to deal with bouncebacks or angry replies.
I used to have an AOL account with the string 'Sara' in it. Every month or so I'd recieve an email with 100 names in the 'to' field and out of curiousity I'd try pulling up a profile on a bunch of them, most would return the results that the user did not exist.
I'd be curious to see who would recieve more spam-- BOTH accounts being equally inactive and on notorious 'spam' email hosts such as yahoo, AOL, MSN, etc. ba56ugnu0i99845@domain.com or saragirl69@domain.com All bets are on the latter.
-Sara
I had a similar experience with junk faxes at my last job. Tons of our machines got ads for a toner company. I called the business and was informed that I had requested these ads. Funny thing though. This went to at least 30 fax machines I saw that day and spread across at least 15 different departments in the company. There is no way that all of these people opted in for this crap. How do you prove we did not?
Another issue. I get quite a few spams that claim that they are not intended for receipients of xx list of states, and they are filtered to prevent residents of those states "to the best of their ability". I can tell you that they have NO ability to filter that --> thats the best ability.
It is all a scam and just another way for spammers to try to fool you or justify they are providing a useful service.
The "Opt in/out" debate pertains to a lot of things and not just emails. The phone company comes to mind on this one. Don't want your phone number published in the phone book or given out in directory assistance? That is an option that they charge for and on a monthly basis. Yes, you have to pay to prevent getting dinner time calls for a motor club.
How about the financial institution debacle last year with the information sharing? I noticed ONE opt out notice that was clearly marked as such. All others were buried inside filler ads and in back of not returned sections of the monthly bill and required a seperate mailing to a different address. On one hand these companies appear to be your consumer oriented friend to get your business and then they jam it up your ass when they think they have you. No wonder there are so many frustrated people in the world today.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Yeah, except for the people microsoft sells your email address to. 3 months ago, as a test, I created a VERY random 16character email account name on Hotmail.com. 8 days ago, I received spam from four different servers, all corporate.
That wouldn't really make any sense, MS dosen't want people sending you spam, it just increases their bandwidth usage.
If they really wanted to stop thier users from getting spammed, they would not have all of their users listed in the member directory by default.
Isn't it nice to have your email instantly published to a list for a spam bot to pick up?
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Laziness is the father.
When websites ask for my address and I really don't want to give it to them, I have a very simple method:
abuse@[Upstream Provider of website]
Let's see them talk their "we didn't spam" asses out of that mess, shall we?
I disable sigs...do you?
Microsoft does not sell hotmail addresses, if for no other reason than no one would buy them. The reason your random hotmail addresses are quickly harvest and spammed is because of programs spammers use to collect e-mail addresses. Basically the program just listens to all the traffic that goes through hotmail and when a new address is created it logs it. One of my friends had one of these programs which he used to get new addresses to spam for his new website. I really don't think that a lot of the big e-mail providers sell addresses, if it was ever proven it would be a public relations nightmare.