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Beating the Spam Merchants

Posted by timothy on from the boilss-your-heart-cockles dept.

Crowbraid writes: "Well-written column by Margie Boule from the Portland Oregonian about an individual who got tired of getting spam, sued the company for $25 an email, and won." See also Bennett Haselton's anti-spam page, where he has details on "pursuing the anti-spam lawsuits on four separate fronts." (Those lawsuits were mentioned a few months back.)

1 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. You don't contribute to OSS either, do you? by devphil · · Score: 4, Informative
    And I don't put my e-mail in public places where spammers would look to pick it up.

    Such as web archives of mailing lists for opensource projects? It must be nice to sit there handing out advice and calling people idiots when you never contribute to the community.

    Most of the spam I get is at an address harvested from mailing list archives for GCC, Doxygen, and few other much smaller projects. Does that mean I'm an idiot? If you think so, perhaps you shouldn't be using these programs (after all, an idiot has contributed to them).

    Does that mean I'm going to stop sending mail to a public mailing list? No, because as much as I'd like to reduce the amount of spam I get, I'd much rather see improved software.

    As far as I'm concerned if you get spammed, it's your fault. [...] But while spamming is still a problem, deal with it and don't be an idiot.

    Suing spammers is being an idiot? Huh?

    --
    You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)