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Firm Pays 6.5 Million for Fax Spamming

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the step-in-the-right-direction dept.

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!

6 of 250 comments (clear)

  1. It IS getting out of hand by IronTek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Well, scratch that, it's been out of hand...I get many, many more junk emails to my inbox every day than legitimate emails...and I'm getting sick of it. Unfortunately, the email address is the one I've been using for years. This creates a dual problem. On one hand, everyone has it, so it would be a pain to tell everyone I've changed it. But also, since I've been using it for so long (6 years at least) it's been exposed to every single spammer on the planet.

    What I want to know is where the hell are the lawmakers and the courts on this one? The senate's too busy going outside to say the pledge...get the hell back in the building and vote on some anti-spam laws!

    Also, in an election year (such as this one...hey!), I'm still surprised an enterprising poltician hasn't brought this up in tech-heavy districts...I'd go out and vote if someone running for congress would at least make it sort of an issue...just give me something!

    1. Re:It IS getting out of hand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Same problem here: 60 junkmails a day. But I don't want lawyers to "fix" it for me. I'd rather delete them one by one (if we can't come up with a better solution) before I ask for people who don't know what they're dealing with to regulate email. What we need instead is a simple, scalable and unforgeable way of identifying the sender of an email. Anonymous mail should still be possible, but anybody can then decide if he wants to receive it or not.

    2. Re:It IS getting out of hand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      Do something which makes your email address public. Run a popular website, post on usenet or publish useful code. That's enough to "subscribe" to spam. You can do foolish things like entering raffles or maybe your friends send you e-postcards, but that is not required. Short email addresses like "name.surname@short.com" are more likely to be spammed, too, so if you have "dpz239038@mailhost.someobscureprovider.com" you'll have to work harder to receive spam.

  2. A quote from this website: by Skreech · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Junk faxes are not only an inconvenience to consumers, but they waste money, time and interfere with crucial businesses operations. In order to do business in today's world you need a fax machine. The intent of the machine is to communicate with friends, family, and business partners. It is not an open invitation for unscrupulous advertisers to block your phone lines, run up your operating budget, and waste paper."

    - Dan Jacobson, Legislative Advocate, CALPIRG

    If that doesn't make you want to buy Dan a beer, the terrorists have already won. ;) Although this quote pertains to faxes, it summarises my feelings about spam email if you replace "paper" with "bandwidth" and "phone lines" with "mail servers."

  3. Pizza + Comics? by ziggr · · Score: 1, Insightful
    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!
    Eating pizza while reading comics? You'll get greasy fingerprints all over the pages!
  4. This Just In! by PhxBlue · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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!

    News Flash - Over 90% of /.ers don't care about the spam in Taco's inbox, claim "He should install a fscking filter if he doesn't like spam."

    Okay, so that's not really news. But then, neither is the state of Taco's inbox.

    In other news, Microsoft still sucks and you're still stealing television content when you take a crap during the commercial break.

    --
    !#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.