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?

Comments

Call them

[littlerubberfeet]

I know it is not a method of legal recourse, but CALL them, preferably not at a general sales number, but a direct line (to someone in legal). This should get results.

Unfortunately, I think only the government can enforce the new law, so us private citizens are royally fucked over.

Someone above mentioned charging them on an increasing scale. Go ahead, but only after you have sent them a bill. If they don't accept certified mail, send it guaranteed delivery. They can't ignore that either, unless it is out of gross negligence (the mail room lost it...) or stupidity.

Can you stop doing business with them? Then do so, and wait exactly 18 months to the day. Then, bill them for taking up your time ($50 an hour), server space ($5 a Kilobyte), and bandwith ($10 a meg transfered) on an increasing scale.

My 2 cents...as above, IANAL...BIHBTC (but I have been to court).

Spammers You May Know

[LarryRiedel]

It is not particularly unusual to know who is sending the "spam", or who is paying for it to be sent. In either case the mail message headers will indicate where is the source of the message, and consequently it will provide enough information to determine who is the ISP for the host which sent the message. Either that ISP will have a process for dealing with "abuse", or their upstream ISP will, etc.

Larry

Address

[rf0]

When filling out online forms its always worth putting "tagged" address like slashdot@domain.org, linux.com@domain.org. That way if you get spammed you know who sold your email address

Rus

procmail - their contact address

[menscher]

I had this problem about a year ago with a company. I asked three times to be removed, threatened lawsuits, etc. Each time I was ignored, or told that I would be removed in 2 weeks. After about a year of this I wrote a procmail rule. Basically, it forwarded each spam I received through their servers, along with a note requesting to be removed, to all of their contact addresses (they had several). Within a week or two I was removed.

Re:c'mon

[dbirchall]

Well, that depends on quantity, don't you think?

Presuming you spend 8 hours a day sleeping, you've got about 57,600 seconds per day to be awake. If you're exceptionally fast, you might be able to delete individual messages at a rate of one per second. But you're probably not fast enough to determine whether things are spam and delete them at that rate. Probably more like one every 3-5 seconds. So your capacity on a daily basis is perhaps somewhere between 11,000 and 20,000 messages.

That, of course, presumes that you do nothing but scan messages and hit delete. All day. What percentage of mail you receive is spam? If you're relatively fortunate and it's only about 50%, and it takes you an exceptionally fast 55-57 seconds to read and possibly respond to each non-spam message, that means one spam plus one non-spam takes you about a minute. Now you're down to 1,920 messages a day, maximum.

Of course, you don't want to spend 16 hours a day in email. You'll probably spend several hours working, at least an hour total eating, some time in the bathroom, maybe time going places, maybe time just having a life. That all probably leaves you with only 1-4 hours of time to spend on e-mail, if you're a bad case (no one should have to spend that much time every day IMO).

So... 60-480 messages per day that you can probably handle. How much spam do you get? :)

Cease and desist letter.

[foniksonik]

You are describing harassment and invasion of privacy. Send a hard copy letter of cease and desist care of their legal department. Add a clause that you will place a lean on their assets for damages, you don't have to specify how much... unspecified damages. That should get their attention. If it doesn't, go ahead and file the lean with your local county judge... w/ copies sent to the same address. Collecting is never easy but the threat is usually enough to get action.