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Legal Recourse Against Spammers You May Know?
xrepete asks: "I have been getting spammed by a legitimate company for the last five months. I have gone to their site to ask to be removed, and sent several e-mails to various address asking to be removed from their mailing list. I have been totally ignored. We all get spam from individuals we can't identify, but what recourse do we have if we actually _can_ identify them. I've heard that it is illegal for a company to not allow you to opt-out of marketing spam, but I can find any information about how to go about it." This was last touched on over three years ago, but recent events have shown that the new spam laws may have better teeth. Are there other things we can do to curb the e-mail abuses of the companies we do business with?
Charge them a series of escalating handling fees, starting at $5 and moving up to $5000 per message or whatever you feel like (don't be too unreasaonable). Give them one week before you start charging.
Send them written notice by both regular and registered mail. If they accept the registered mail, they cannot claim ignorance of your fees. If they deny the registered mail, then you have done your best to inform them of your rates.
When you send your bills, give them a time limit to pay them. If they do not pay you, take them to small claims court for the total amount they have not paid.
Good luck! (And of course, IANAL)
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
>> Is it too damn hard to hit the check box and hit delete? Leave it to slashdotters to find needlessly complicated solutions to idiotically simple problems
Actually, it is too hard. Particularly when spammers flasify subjects, senders, reply-to's, etc. Who are you to decide how hard it is?
>> Keeping in mind I am referring to an individual user, and not a company, which may otherwise spend lots of money on bandwidth, lost work, et cetera.
Oh, so its not okay for companies to deal with spam, but its okay for individuals? You are not nice. Not nice at all. And your patronizing tone is very unwelcome.
There's a fax #. It says to mark the fax "ATTN: Recruitment", but if you send 100 faxes with "ATTN: Spamming Department", it will probably get to the right place, be it marketing or IT. Try to be nice and polite, but clearly indignant.
There's also a nice job application web form. If they got 1000 applications (you're a geek, cobble up a Perl LWP program), all with a message asking them to stop spamming you, again it will probably get escalated and do you some good. Include the full text of relevant federal and state anti-spam laws. Yes, use your real name - you want to really be taken off their list.
Also notice: a physical address. Haven't tried looking it up, but odds are you'll be able to find some phone number some where with it. Start polite and direct. If that doesn't work, try working through the exchange/pbx prefix to people at random. Validate that they work for that company and then repeat the message. For most the hits will be "it's not my department, you have to call so and so", but who cares; keep calling them anyway. You'll destroy productivity and be communicating the fact their business processes are for shite; eventually the right people will hear about, even if it's from fellow employees who now hate them for making their lives miserable.
Is it possible that they might get huffy and spam you more? Sure, but like you said, they are trying or seem to be legit so they can't afford to take it too far.
With the dot.bust and layoffs it is a real possibility that the one person whose job it was to edit the spam list was layed off and the remaining crew are too clueless to spend the time learning how to fix it - a little insult and injury is usually what's need to kick a lazy compnay in the butt. Been on the receiving side enough to know.
You sir, are an ass.
Someone goes on vacation for 6 months, and returns to find 35,000 emails in their inbox. 200 spams a day is normal for quite a few people. Said person gets carpal tunnel syndrome by having to check a box 35,000 times. Said person wastes 9.7 hours deleting spam. (one delete per second).
NOW, imagine if that person (individual user) deletes spam at the same rate per day. they waste three minutes a day deleting spam. 19.4 hours a year. Now, if there are, say 5 million people with a spam problem that bad (a conservatve estimate) that means 97 million hours are wasted a year because of spammers. 11,000 years of time gone, because of Spam.
What if that time were spent raising children (as individual users tend to do) or helping kids learn to read? What if that three minutes a day were spent on a few situps? Maybe the US wouldn't have the obesity problem it does today. What if everyone could sit down for three minutes more a day and relax?
Also, IF those 5 million people were dealing with spam at work, that is 1.5 trillion in lost wages ($15 an hour) in ONE YEAR. Hell, these spammers are costing us more then our national debt.
I say YES, it is too hard to hit that check box and hit delete.
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Add a clause that you will place a lean on their assets...
Obviously you don't read too much. Lean is what you do when you're standing at an angle. Lien is what you file against someone's property. Oh, and for your benefit, "loose" is what your pants are when they keep falling down; "lose" is when you have misplaced something.
This post brought to you by the Insensitive Grammar Nazis of Slashdot.
Your answer has nothing to do with the question. He already knows who is sending this, likely he shoped at their store once, entered a contest where they notify by email, and then started getting their advertising flyers in his email. On all levels it checks out as them - they own the domain it is from, the spam, when opened (often it is some windows only format though) looks just like the one they send with the local newspaper. It is clear exactly who sent it. So you try the opt-out address, and it doesn't work.
So, how does your post help them at all? You can filter on the sender just as easially as who it is to.