Firm Pays 6.5 Million for Fax Spamming

Geopoliticus writes "This article over at the Chicago Tribune tells of a car dealership in St. Louis that will pay up to 6.5 million to people it sent junk faxes to. Now, if we could just get this kind of settlement for all the crap in my inbox I could stay unemployed forever." If I got a quarter for each piece of junkmail in my inbox, it would cover having a pizza delivered to my house every day, and still have enough left over to get a few comics to read each day while I ate!

Comments

Konsidering He Is A Linux User...

[DavidJA]

I could stay unemployed forever

Considering you are a open sauce programmer, I wouldn't worry about gaining real employment anytime soon

Re:Fax vs. Email spamming

[Grape Shasta]

Well, of course someone will make the argument that "Spam costs companies billions each year in lost bandwidth, storage, and employee's time." I see those kind of statistics all the time and they're such B.S. Yes, spam sucks, but its not draining our economy or anything.

If your bandwidth and storage setup is so tight that some spam pushes it over the edge, that's your own fault for a poor server setup. And do you really think employees would get more done in a day if they hadn't had to delete those 10 messages? Sure, 15 seconds times a million employees is a lot of seconds. But the fact is, each of those individuals are going to do the same amount of work each day regardless if the spam shows up or not.

On the other hand, I think there may be a point if someone wants to talk about how much SPAM is costing companies each year. Those sick days add up.

Man

[Apreche]

Why does everyone complain about spam? All you guys want is free money because some guy is making a living by sending you junk e-mail. If someone sends me junk snail mail I don't go clamoring the government to make it illegal, and I don't try to have a lawsuit to make me money. I just toss it in the trash. As for spam it is a little more annoying to toss in the trash, but you know what. I used to get spam, back in the day, but ever since I got to college, nothing. And its not the college protecting me from spam with a filter, because other people here get tons of spam. I created a yahoo e-mail address the other day, and its got more spam in it in an hour than I've seen, ever. You know why? I don't type my e-mail address into forms I don't trust. I opt-out of everything. I am *gasp* careful. I dont' even have a little program that filters spam out, I use lite Eudora with only the PGP plugin. Guess what? I've had 1, count 'em ONE spam e-mail in 2 YEARS. Don't ask the government to do something for you, if you can do it yourself.