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FTC Encourages Consumers to Forward Them Spam
Burl Ives writes "See this CNN Article. 'The FTC encourages consumers to forward any spam they receive to the e-mail address uce@ftc.gov'. I'd say if they've posted their e-mail on the web, they are probably getting as much as the rest of us already, which isn't to say I'm not hoping to see some discussion of using the statistical spam sorters to auto forward a lot to them in encouragement..." I've been using SpamAssassin for some time now with excellent results. Perhaps now I need to have my spam folder auto-forward to the FTC as well.
I like the idea of forwarding the spam, but the question remains what will they do with it?
For instance, Yahoo Mail has a feature where you can forward Spam to their Yahoo! Customer Care department. Yet, you don't know what happens.
I don't know if this is a "feel good" attempt at showing that they are handling spam or they actually run some super secret program and change their spam variables.
I'd like to see what the FTC is doing with the spam sent to them. Are they going to start a black list? Will they take action against the spammers?
Should I forward my spam even though I'm not American?
The question is, how much would you pay to have somebody delete a spam message? If it's 1 cent, and if the person could kill one every 5 seconds (which seems pretty reasonable ... I don't even read the whole subjectline before deleting most spam), then we are at about 7 dollars an hour. Given that this is not a high-skill task that could be done from the home (possibly in the third world, where $7/hour is a very high wage), we may have a new industry here.
For less than the price of a coffee per day, a user gets spam-free email, and somebody else gets to pay the rent.
Of course, there is a downside: somebody might pay the anti-spam folks money to look the other way on some messages. And there is a privacy concern.
So, am I nuts?
I'm sure the FTC won't act on singular items; however, if they get 5,000 of a single spam -- that's probably a pretty good indication that it is indeed spam and should be examined more closely.
Heck, it even made it into a slashdot poll
I just recieved from SPAMCOP.NET what I suspect might be 'SHAKEDOWN Email.'
I own a domain but do not operate it. (I will not disclose the domain because that just makes me a target so you will forgive my lack of being specific on this.) My email server will recieve email for this domain, but there is no active use for it. My server has no open relays.
They sent me an email saying there has been or are complaints. This is the smaller part of the email. The rest of it is advertising services to me... SELLING ME THINGS and delivering propaganda.
When a bulk of the email contains advertisment of services and only a small portion of it delivers vague and unsupported information, I have to believe it's SPAM.
Is this a standard practice for SPAMCOP.NET?
Does this only apply to Americans, or does the FTC cover elsewhere/entire Internet/world?
What if your in America and the spam comes from China?
I thought one of the police jobs for the federal governemnt was investigating and arresting people for committing fraud. Why aren't they doing it to spam businesses?
Most people are pissed about spam because its unwanted email and the popular focus has been on limiting or controlling unwanted email. I think this is misguided, because the spammers (both the freelance mail senders and those who do their own sending for their own products) tend to join forces with the more legitimate direct marketing community and bring the debate about stopping spam to a standstill.
I think a better tactic would be to go after the products and services being sold via spam. IMHO nearly all (95%?) of them are fraudulent or illegal. If you eliminate the fraud businesses behind the spam, I think the spam itself will dramatically lighten up.
Going after the people that send the mail is also very difficult since you don't know where they are and many spams are impossible to track the origin. But in order to sell something you have to at least be reachable enough to be paid, and that should make it much easier and less resource intensive to find the fraudsters and put the screws to them.
While I like the idea that getting rid of the unsolicited email in and of itself, I think its also the least effective way to get rid of spam.
> I think I'd start [forwarding spam to Yahoo] if they
> sent me a summary monthly
I had exactly the opposite problem. Earthlink has an address where you can forward spam, and every time you do, they send you an acknowledgement message! I was diligently forwarding all of my spam to them, in the hope that it would eventually cut down on the number of unwanted messages that I receive... until I realized that I was effectively doubling the number of unwanted messages I received. One for the original spam, and one for the ack.
Then I carefully read their web page about forwarding. The only people they are going after are the ones that use Earthlink's own facilities to send spam. Like any significant spammer is going to do that in today's environment.
So I have come to the conclusion that ISPs sometimes provide a place to forward spam so they will appear to be doing something, and so that people can feel like they are doing something to eliminate spam.
The FTC may have similar motives -- it wouldn't be the first time that a U.S. government agency did something solely for the PR value -- but let's hope that's not the case.
For example, I'm a quite active Usenet poster, using "[something]@expires-[year][month].[mydomain]" as my email address. "expires-200209" means the entire subdomain will be kicked after Sep 30. After that time, the spammer won't find a MX record for that subdomain and has no possibility to annoy me with his junk.
For legitimate correspondents, I'm telling them email adresses with a subdomain which will never expire or only very far in the future.
Running the risk of having my cute web server /.'d until it blows the whistle, here is a more detailed draft.
DocSnyder.
The fallacy here is in assuming that every employee exists in a continual "on-and-working" state from the moment she sits down at her desk. Under such an assumption, 10 seconds spent doing something else equals 10 seconds of quantifiable production loss.
...
Ten seconds spent doing something else don't result in 10 seconds less of X.
No, not generically, but in the case of spam it does.
I spend a certain amount of time at work going through email. I have to. We use it for a lot of critical communications, and spam or no, it is more efficient for those purposes than phone, memo, or face to face.
So yeah, I will still blink, zone out, go to the bathroom, smoke 'n joke (or in my case, coca-cola and joke), whatever. But I will also waste time with spam. It is additive; it replaces time that I would be productively communicating.
Oh well, I bill all my time and it is a cost of doing business. My employer will save money if they can stop it.
How many times do I have to opt out if a million businesses decide to take up spamming over the course of the next year or so. Sometimes I get over a dozen different copies of exactly the same spam from exactly the same sender, sent to a dozen different email addresses. These are legitimately different addresses because they have different roles. Of course a spammer won't know they go to the same person. But sending spam to them is essentially OFF TOPIC because their role isn't to respond to advertising.
Until the FTC (and this may require Congress to do this) adopts the principle that opting *IN* is required first, and that I should not have to go to the trouble to opt out if I never opted in in the first place, then as far as I'm concerned, any actions by the FTC is misguided and useless.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Would you be kind enough to write a small HOWTO or recipe on how to do this ? I've been meaning to try something similar, but I'm too lazy too read all the docs.
--f
Imagine, say, the outcry if you regularly got sales calls at work from telemarketers. Even if you were able to hang these calls up in a second or two, they would still be a completely unwarranted disturbance to your working routine, and heads would undoubtedly roll.
Why is spam any different? Your argument about yawning, etc, is totally spurious as this time is already factored in. In effect, the company PAYS you to be comfortable at work (ie. breathe in and out, shift in your chair, etc.) so you can be maximally productive. They DO NOT pay you to read advertisements for penile enlargement products, throw the paper version of such advertisements in the wastepaper basket, hang up the phone on such telemarketed advertisements, or delete the same email advertisements from your inbox.
I've never heard anybody who wanted to keep their job say they were going to miss any project meeting, by the way, but I have certainly heard people wish they had, say, another 10 productive minutes at a crucial time of the day, so they could go to that meeting more prepared.
Spam costs individuals time. Time they do not chose to spend - and that's the key. After all, time is money as we all know.
most spammers are smart enough not to spam a .gov e-mail address.
I really doubt this. You'd think they'd be smart enough to not send spam to any 'webmaster@' addresses, since whoever gets mail to that address has the greatest chances of being someone is willing and able to block their messages from getting to ALL the other users at that domain... however I see more email addressed to webmaster@domain than any other address that is forwarded to me. Presumably, because they know it will be a valid address at almost every domain, and/or they just spider them from web pages and put no further thought into it.
Although, I haven't seen much being sent to 'abuse@', so most of the spam software authors probably made some cursory filtering rules when they first started making their stuff, but I doubt '.gov' was in them. Only a very tiny percentage of .gov users would actually have the authority/ability to take action against spammers anyway, and there's bound to be some potential customers among the rest of them. That's the whole point of spam: not putting too much thought into the recipients. Gather hundreds of millions of addresses en mass, blast out millions of emails every day, a couple % of the recipients will buy the crap you're selling. Another couple % of the people will get downright pissed at receiving your junkmail, but they don't matter as long as you're making money. If you start getting too nitpicky about who you're sending to, then it starts to resemble real work and isn't as profitable...
Nope -- a given person works about the same percentage of the time on average. Being put under the gun will push the percentage up for a while; getting ahead of schedule and having the boss on vacation will let the percentage down for a while -- but in the long run it stays more or less constant.
Someone deprived of his usual downtime one day will make it up later, one way or another, to blow off the stress. (If anything, the annoyance of being spammed is likely to raise the overall percentage of "down time" by adding just a bit more grind to each day.)
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Note the bit about removal lists
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Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I report all my spam through SpamCop since I figure at least some of those ISPs out there will be depriving the spammers of their Internet access. I am waiting for the day when ISPs will see dumping spammers as a profit center and charge hefty cleanup deposits to those whom they allow to send more than N messages a day.
But for my own sanity, I pay SpamCop $30 a year to use their filtering service. I get fewer than 0.5 percent false positives, my real mail just comes through normally, and the spam is sitting there at SpamCop waiting for me to report it (checking for false positives, etc.).
Every time I make a report, I am contributing to the database tracking spam source IPs in the SpamCop Blocking List.