Selling your Inbox Instead of Chocolates?

Qxz86 asks: "I, am an 8th grader at a Tennessee middle school, and on the 21st of February, I was asked to provide names and e-mails and/or street addresses to a company called Schoolmall. The company then distributes them among companies like AT&T and Toshiba. Needless to say, they then spam you legally on account of these solicitations. For every nine that I turn in my school gets $2.25. How do you feel about this?" SchoolMall, a virtual "shopping mall", allows students to purchase items from several large retail chains, and a portion of that purchase (depending on the vendor) goes back to the school. This sounds innocent enough, but I am definitely bothered by the insinuation that they are asking children for email addresses with which someone can Spam unsuspecting targets. Does anyone else have more information on this program?

Comments

I feel that it sucks

[eXtro]

I don't live in that area, but in the past I've determined that one of the charities I donated to sold my name to other charities. That ended my donations to them. If I were in the area I'd make sure that no further nickels or dimes would be forthcoming from me.

What next?

[psyconaut]

How about the teachers at the beginning of class saying "today's math class is brought to you by Coca Cola."?

Seriously...what more can we do to pollute young minds? Don't some schools still make kids watch that propoganda TV?

-psy

Run

[nocomment]

Run from schoolmall, run hard run fast run far.
I don't like this one little bit. People I know turning in my address for $$$? That's sneaky and underhanded. I think spam has gone far enough. I do beleive it is the #1 threat on the internet right now. Marketing people need to find another way to solicit me.

• Like maybe get a giant size board and put it next to freeways and such. People providing such services could bill to have people put up their ads. We can call it the "billboard".
• 
  
  -or-
  
  
• purchase time on television sets in between shows or during a break time. During these breaks, commercial advertisers could show their wares. We could call these "commercial breaks".

There's lots of ways to target me. But cramming 45+messages a day in my inbox is dammed annoying! If people checked their postal mailboxes everyday and got 45 junk emails there'd certainly be a lot more done about it at the governemnt level do'nt ya think? Maybe if the governement charged $0.10 tax per commercial email that went out spammers wouldn't be so happy to have their "45 million email opt-in lists". That would come out to $4.5 million. I'm sure that would get the spammers to trim the fat out of their lists.

How to make non-profit PROFIT

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

1. Buy CD with 100,000,000 email addresses

2. Hire geek to write bot to submit addresses 20 at a time to schoolmall

3. Non-profit PROFIT!