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

Easy Answer

[trentfoley]

Are there other things we can do to curb the e-mail abuses of the companies we do business with?

Simple, Threaten them with the loss of your business.

Oh yeah, and you have to bitch about it on Slashdot to get a lot of people doing it.

Charge them!

[shfted!]

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)

I've got an idea...

[jpsowin]

Post their site to slashdot.
After their site shuts down, they will get your point. And it's legal!

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).

Legal Recourse? Why on earth...?

[FFFish]

Illegal recourse will be far, far more satisfying, I'm sure.

Go for it.

We won't tell.

End Spam Right Now!

[Anonymous Coward]

You can END ALL SPAM today for FREE!!!.

Just go to the site: www.wewillownyourbox.com, and download the Spam plugin FREE!!!! (Sorry, Windows customers only)

Stop spam today!

To unsubscribe from this post go to www.wewillownyourbox.com and download the unsubscribe plugin. (Sorry, Windows customers only)

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

Re:Spammers You May Know

[John Hasler]

> In either case the mail message headers will
> indicate where is the source of the message...

Not true. Headers can be forged.

Re:Spammers You May Know

[LarryRiedel]

In either case the mail message headers will indicate where is the source of the message...

Not true. Headers can be forged.

At some point on the path from source host to destination mailbox there will be a transition to a host on a legitmate ISP, and that host will correctly report the IP address from which it received the message; for the purpose of complaining, that IP address can be considered the source of the message.

Larry

Re:c'mon

[xoboots]

>> 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.

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

Re:Address

[yuri benjamin]

Exactly. I use spamgourmet for this.

Re:Address

[Permission Denied]

When filling out online forms its always worth putting "tagged" address like slashdot@domain.org, linux.com@domain.org.

I've been doing this for over five years and my "real" address has (thank goodness) never got out (I only give it to humans). Over the course of five years, I've only accumulated about twenty or thirty procmail rules to discard mail to addresses that have been sold or leaked (most often via lax policy on someone else's website where large numbers of user addresses were posted). I also threw together an emacs lisp hack for gnus that automatically generates a new address whenever I post to usenet. I get literally zero spam and I never worry about legitimate mail not getting through.

For those who think having a vanity domain and mucking with sendmail is not worth it - there are other ways to do this. I believe sendmail's defaults allow you to send mail to "account+foo@example.com" where foo is any arbitrary string. I know for certain that qmail allows you to send mail to account-foo@example.com out of the box.

I'm so happy with this setup that whenever a spam-related story comes up on Slashdot, I post this same information. Gotta share the love.

Re:Address

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe sendmail's defaults allow you to send mail to "account+foo@example.com" where foo is any arbitrary string.

No offense, but the spammers aren't that stupid. That's like people who write "bobNOSPAM@foo.com" thinking that will work. Most of the spam harvesting software knows about the "X+Y@" sendmail division and removes the "+Y" portion from the collection.

Re:Address

[Zocalo]

I use this technique too. One other often over looked benefit of doing this is that it makes sorting your incoming mail into folders *very* easy. For example, email to "amazon@domain.com" is from Amazon Books and can be filed into the folder "Amazon" - simple. Even if the company or mailing list changes thier subject tag, domain or anything else you might try filtering on, they are never going to change *your* email address.

Re:Address

[Yottabyte84]

I personaly use both spamgourmet, and sneakemail.

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.

i always wanted to do this

[gyratedotorg]

if i could get their (preferably toll-free) phone numbers, i'd like to set up some sort of an auto-dialer to repeatedly call these "businesses" and play my own pre-recorded messages.

"want to increase your profit size?!"

"make money now!"

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? :)

Alternative Contacts

[JGski]

When you can't find the obvious contact point, try the non-obvious ones: there is contact info on their employment page

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.

Re:Alternative Contacts

[sakusha]

Oh come on, you can be more creative than that with a FAX machine. Some friends and I tried a revenge-fax method we heard about, we used to wait until late night (when presumably nobody was around to watch the fax machine), get an 8.5x24inch piece of black paper, start faxing it to the target, and then once the lead end of the black page came out of the machine, we'd tape it to the trailing end. You create a continuous loop of black paper, so you are faxing an endless black fax (make sure everything is aligned perfectly or the loop will walk sideways over time).
At worst, you'll waste their fax paper, at best, you'll burn out the thermal printheads on their fax machine.
Optional: tape a small piece of white paper with a short message to the loop (keep it small, you don't want to let those thermal printheads cool off by transmitting too much white). I'd recommend removing the sender's phone number from your fax machine before sending this (which, BTW, is illegal now).

Re:Alternative Contacts

[RevAaron]

Heh. I work with a woman who did this, although using white paper with a printed message in ink rather than an all-black piece of paper. The killer was an 800 fax number; they had a helluva bill I imagine.

Re:Alternative Contacts

[JGski]

The question is whether you want to actually communicate the specific information of the request "I want you to stop spamming me", or if you to communication the specific information "HATE HATE HATE HATE". The former may gain the original poster's goal. The latter will be disconnected from that goal.

I don't see the point of simply being harrassing without wanting to achieve something specific. Harrassing for the pleasure of it makes you a sociopath, not a legitimately aggrieved consumer escalating ignored requests. Another reason I'd include my real contact info and moderate the attack to irritating but not excessive.

Does anyone still use thermally printed faxes anymore? At least in California, particularlly a dot-com-ish kind of company, I certainly doubt it. Inkjet is more likely.

Re:Alternative Contacts

[Jucius Maximus]

"At worst, you'll waste their fax paper, at best, you'll burn out the thermal printheads on their fax machine."

At worst, you'll just put a few extra megs onto the hard drive of the computer that's monitoring their fax line.

Re:Alternative Contacts

[sakusha]

I don't know a single person or company that owns any fax machine other than ancient thermal printer units they bought when fax was considered hi tech. Fax is for Luddites that don't use computers.

Re:Alternative Contacts tsarkon reports on FUCK

[Anonymous Coward]

WARNING, SLASHDOT NOW TIES AC COMMENTS WITH USER
(Use a disposable account from a disposable IP before moderating this up. Editors generally watch and see who moderates controversial things like this up.)

When you are logged in, /. ties your user account to any Anonymous Coward postings you make... Thus they know who posted it. To demonstrate this:

1. Get mod points.
2. Post an AC comment while logged in
3. Change your dynamic ip, clear all cookies
4. Log back in and try to moderate your AC comment... you can't!!!

Please *log out* AND use another browser before making your AC comments.
Your UID is being tracked, it's not Anonymous. Lots of people post lots of things to Slashdot as AC only because they believe it is really anonymous - it isn't. They hunt "trolls" (non-karma whores and non-group thinking bots) down.

This is true. I used to be a bit more freestyle and witty AC and be a nice guy logged in [basically a karma whore]. After a short while, I could no longer moderate. Slashdot does brand AC posts with IP and then map them back to users. They lie about AC, AC doesn't exist if you re-use ip addresses.

Big brother is watching. So while I might be a "troll" a lot of the AC things I said were to protect myself from Slash-bot groupthink. They punished me for voicing my opinion freestyle.

They also revoke moderation FOREVER - $rtbl it is called, for any moderations of any post that have been secretly flagged annoying [Slashcode has hidden flags viewable by editors]. If you *EVER* mod up something an editor secretly marked annoying you NEVER moderate again, ever - ever even if your karma is capped.

Also, Slashdot uses the friends system to track "trolls." Mark a troll you find funny as a friend *bang* $rtbl never to moderate ever again. My real account had many many good friends who had good karma, and a few funny trolls later, no more moderation for that account. Again, Slashdot is spying on its users to make the people who find certain things funny uneligible to moderate. You will never moderate again if you are a friend of a "foe or freak" of an editor.

FACT: This is in Slashcode CVS

Revision 1.7.2.5 / (download) - annotate - [select for diffs] , Thu Feb 8 13:12:32 2001 UTC (2 years, 9 months ago) by pudge
Branch: bender
CVS Tags: v1_1_3_0
Changes since 1.7.2.4: +18 -7 lines
Diff to previous 1.7.2.4 to branchpoint 1.7

log more AC info

So AC is a scam here. Hitler-Malda screws AC posts in the caboose. So now all you can do is go 100% AC, or , as they expect you to, KARMA WHORE. And it is so lame and unfair and probably illegal as they lie about anonymity.

Also, sometimes when certain information becomes an active thread, they bitchslap the thread much later so that people think its "safe" to participate and the whole thing gets slapped.

There is a presumption anonymous means something. They lie like rugs to the posting public by using the word anonymous. It is not. They brazenly lie though and the un-assuming poster is having everything he says correlated with him and stored in a computer just waiting to be subpoenaed by the people that Slashdot claims to hate but works for. They work for the fascist forces and components of the US government. I like the US and other Western governments but they have good and bad components - there are things you need to do to protect yourself from the bad components. Basically "covering your ass" so to speak. At Slashdot, in lying about AC, un-protects its posting public (seeding a de-anonymizing privacy stripping pandemic in their own "little" way). This makes Slashdot a very dangerous target for you the posters to have your "anonymous" information subpoenaed and you to be chased down and persecuted for speaking your mind. I think that it is a joke Slashdot editors post about SCO, MSFT, RIAA, MPAA, TIA, FBI, etc. They do the same fascist big-brotherly things that those companies do the pub

Source of my spam...

[Unsolicited Commando]

Most of my spam comes from my friends and family. Is there any legal recourse I can take against them? Can I sue my grandma for sending me a picture of the worlds largest cat?

Re:c'mon

[littlerubberfeet]

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.

Procmail.

[evilad]

Bounce every offending email to all of the marketing addresses you can find at that company, along with a polite request that you not receive any more.

Do not leave a copy in your inbox.

How to deal with spammers in Washington State

[Speequinox]

This site gives you step-by-step instructions:
http://www.smallclaim.info/

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.

Re:Cease and desist letter.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Oooh, you sent them several emails?

[nastyphil]

Call them on the fucking telephone.

Certified Mail

[iamweezman]

I work for the post office. You want to send it certified not registered. Certified is legal proof of mailing and it is the only special service that you can add to postage that will stand in court.

I doubt most judges would ignore a registered receipt, but registered mail is for secure mailing (mailing the hope diamond and such), and is not legal proof of mailing.

Re:Certified Mail

[shfted!]

Ahh... I had the two terms mixed up. Thanks!

Re:Certified Mail

[cartman94501]

Of course, certified mail is only proof that you mailed SOMETHING, not that you mailed the specific thing you claim to have mailed. There is also a less-expensive "proof of mailing" which would serve a similar purpose but without the possibility of confirming that the recipient actually received it. This is popular for things like college applications and tax returns, which simply must be postmarked by a certain date to be considered timely, and where date of receipt is irrelevant.

didn't read question did you?

[bluGill]

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.

Similar problem

[yamla]

I had a similar problem with Microsoft. Actually, with their XBox advertising list. They ignored my removal requests (four), my complaint to their support address, and eventually even a written cease-and-desist letter. Luckily, I found Microsoft was a member of eTrust. Dealing with eTrust, in comparison, was a pleasure. I got a response back from eTrust within minutes asking for more details (and a copy of one or more of the spam). They forwarded it on to Microsoft who responded within a day, apologising for the problem, claiming they had never had a copy of the cease-and-desist letter forwarded to their department (quite possible), and explaining what they had done to ensure I would not receive any more spam from them. This certainly seems to have worked so far. I found it sad that a C&D letter didn't work but I'd strongly recommend dealing with eTrust if you can.

Now, I think the company you are dealing with is not an eTrust member. You may still be able to contact eTrust for help, though. I know at least half their complaints are for non-members so it may be worth it, I'm not sure.

Slashdot HAS covered this

[ottothecow]

I think this is it

Man from michigan sued sears and won under a junk fax law

Depends on what state you're in

[MrResistor]

Many states already have anti-spam laws, usually based on the junk fax laws. In CA I believe you can sue the spammer for $500 per spam, for example. check the laws of your state, and perhaps even consult a legal professional. Even if your state doesn't have a specific anti-spam law, you might still be able to get them under the junk fax laws. Most of the difficulty is finding out who is actually sending the spam, but you already know that.

Re:anonymous being tracked and reported tsarkon

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi. I used to work for VA Linux about 4 years ago (back when they sold hardware). I can tell you that originally, AC comments were, anonymous in the database (the web logs could be used to link a comment to an ip address).

When the scientologists sued (or threatened to sue) over some copyrighted material that got posted anonymously, the slashdot team not only deleted the comments, but also started removing the anonymity from AC posts. This wasn't CmdrTaco's decision -- it came from the VA legal department.

email addresss hijacking?

[josepha48]

What can be done when you get "Mail System Error" mail messages that you did not send? Someone has STOLEN my email address and is using it as the reply to and from. Also lots of mail that says Hi in the subject. Of course it gets filtered out by my spam filter and I just look at the subject and delete.

I HATE SPAM! It's not freedom of speach, its almost DOS'ing mail servers.

Re:c'mon

[xoboots]

Just read the your reply that you posted as an Anonymous Coward (as if we didn't already know that about you). Nice of you to prove my point--you are an outcast and so shall you stay. At least be decent enough to not stoop to AC bullshit. Coward.

Re:Legal Recourse? Why on earth...?

[Jucius Maximus]

"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."

I had the same problem a few years back and simply could not get them to remove me from their list. The recourse I took was probably not illegal but still satisfying and effective:

Eventually I created a 700K image with nothing but the word REMOVE in it. I sent it to them. I never got another message from them again.

Sue they for "illegal use of private property"

[Via_Patrino]

Sue they for "illegal use of private property": using your computer without your authorization to display their ads.

I've threatened sue some real big company with that and it worked.

Re:Call them tsarkon poops on triumph dog

[Thu Anon Coward]

Simon, Simon, Simon.... you really must get out more often...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/30/index.ht ml

Re:Alternative Contacts tsarkon reports on FUCK

[ooby]

I don't think that comment had anything to do with legally approaching spam companies to ask them to stop sending you email.

your AG's office

[stinkycat]

Check w/ your state's Attorney General office. They may have information about any laws re: spam abuse in your state. If your state doesn't have laws in place, your AG may still be interested and helpful. Best wishes for nasty cases of Gonorrhea to all you spammers out there. -C

A bit of a contradiction there

[jamehec]

A legit company that spams? No such animal.