Slashdot Mirror
Spam Bits
Let's mush a few things together into a nice pink rectangular solid: ipandithurts writes "The FTC Chair Timothy Muris doubts the ability of the "CAN SPAM" law to stop SPAM." ElementCDN writes "The Ottawa Citizen has a story on Bernard Balan the King of Spam. Bernard has closed up shop and moved to cottage country near Huntsville, Ontario." CactusMan writes "CTV (among others) is reporting that a Ontario trio has been named in a suit filed by Yahoo under the new CAN-SPAM legislation. Yahoo is claiming that the father and two sons were 'responsible for sending millions of unsolicited messages to users of the company's e-mail service.'" ilsa writes "According to this AP article, as much as 19% of e-mail sent by commercial entities never reaches its destination. 'Promotions and greeting cards were the types of messages most likely to disappear, the study found.' Although this study may have been intended to be alarming, forgive me for thinking this may not be a bad thing." Reader chrisbtoo responds to an earlier spam story: "In today's story about Spam solutions, monstroyer challenged people to crack the Spam Interceptor Captcha. Turns out it was pretty easy." Finally, we can't fail to mention an attempt at making the world's largest spam musubi.
"nearly 800 cups of rice, more than 1,300 slices of the canned lunchmeat and almost 600 feet of seaweed wrap" anyone else feel a little sick after reading that ? ;p
e-mail recipients risk losing newsletters and promotions they've requested.
Who with an ounce of sense would request any sort of e-mail promotion, given the tendency those things have to multiply of those accord? Don't answer that.
The coolest voice ever.
I hang out in various anti-spam communities (news.admin.net-abuse.email and some IRC channesl) and most of us (tinu) agrees that (I) Can Spam is pretty clueless. Now, I'd like to hear comments from someone who's not an anti-spam zealot. Is there anyone who thinks Can Spam is worth the paper it's written on? (Anyone not associated with Direct Marketing).
And if your one of the,"oh, it can't be more than five or ten", companies in the world that is using E-mail as part of your business processes, whether for sales, marketing, customer service, CRM, purchase or account notifications, etc... well then, hell yeah it matters.
,no standardized way of handling return receipts, not to mention the whole grey area of whether emails represent legally binding documents. Check out those disclaimers in your inbox. Any e-commerce site sends you email notifications on your order's status, but they're also available on your account page - ssl encrypted, password authenticated. And you can call customer support for the same info. /t
Well, if you are using e-mail as a *critical* part of your business process then you must have a back up plan: like it or not e-mails get lost, there is no guaranteed delivery (e-fedEx?)
#!/usr/bin/english
1.) SPAM
2.) P2P
3.) Pop ups
4.) Virus
Just when US companies think they have it figured out, some kid in a bedroom will figure out a new way to distribute smarter ones.
I am beginning to think we can't ever get rid of spam through legal measures. I am not an expert on the subject... an I admit that I haven't paid that much attention to it. IT just feels like this is gonna be another case where the US or any other country can't control the global internet. We make it illegal and it isn't going to go away... it might go overseas...
I am convinced that the answer lies in spam filtration. If we stay one technological step ahead of the spammers, they will have to find some other way to make money. I suppose the next problem will be that not all email providers will implement the filters.. but having free software out there to do it will surely increase the number of filtered servers out there.
I think that clients with built in filters (see like stuff from mozilla are a good option). If more people would use these type of clients, it would really hurt spammers.
I have an email address that I have been using for a while now and I have not yet recieved ANY spam (thanks to the good admins of that server I am sure). So if more servers were like that one spam could be a thing of the past.
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
Pray tell, when will there be the day when people, governments, institutions and lawmakers understand that SPAM, worms, viruses and trojans are coming from ONE single corporation?
Let's take a look at some facts:
- ALL trojans that hijack machines run Microsoft operating systems
- ALL webbrowsers that run unwanted executables to hijack machines come from Microssoft
- ALL harmful viruses of the last five years EXCLUSIVELY attack Microsoft programs
- ALL current worms that bring down machines are targetted to infect - you guessed it.
What the hell is this discussion about? Get rid of this crap and the discussion becomes obsolete.
If your customers are that valuable in their purchasing habits...why not simply direct them to a web site to pull the information? Then you can stop emailing people and they will read your web site if you are truely competative. For the most part, this avoid 19% loss -> 0% loss.
I think nobody should be using the email protocol for commercial purposes. It's just so much push technology that is waste and bog. "on demand" seems to be much more suitable for volume.
When people sign up "to get periodic updates about our products" they are opting-in for another type of spam, but it's still scatter that seems misguided to me. Why not just ask people to come back? You could email them the address and everything else once, but they usually already have that from a puchase receipt.
peh
Going offshore won't help, if the banking system is forced to cooperate. The credit card system can collect chargebacks from faraway merchants without much trouble.
Submitting an email address to the "do-not-spam list" risks that address leaking to foreign spammers (or domestic spammers operating in a foreign country). They would know the address is "for real" so they would be happy to add it to the lists they sell.
If the email addresses were distributed in MD5 encrypted format, it would be a little harder for spammers to do much else with it. Of course, as they scan their list to see who is on the "do-not-spam list", they can still sell those addresses to others (outside the US) as "for real". They won't get to know about new addresses from the list, but they will get to know whether or not new addresses gained from other places is real or maybe not.
Perhaps better would be to limit the list to domain names only. The domain name owner would have to authorize being on the list, but then it would specify any email address with any username part would be effectively listed. And even still, it would be MD5 encrypted so spammers aren't handed a list of domain names.
Ultimately, it will have very little effect (big time spammers will move operations to outside the US), and have some problems (spammers will be detecting many "for real" addresses in this). The real solution is to send spammers to the gallows.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
When do they come back? I wouldn't want to keep checking a website just in case there was something new there this week. If I an genuinely interested in something, then I don't mind signing up to hear that there is an update. Maybe you college students have time to go looking for new things every day, but I don't.
Don't try making a career out of sending spam. You're not going to be a big-shot spammer; you're going to be employeed as a big spammer's bitch to do the dirty work that would otherwise get the big-shot spammer thrown in jail or hunted down and harassed by an angry anti-spam activist.
For 99.999% of wanna-be-spammers, there is no profit to be made. They lose their Internet accounts, become the targets of some very angry people. Some anti-spammers will stalk you, show up at your house with a gun, or otherwise make sure that they make your life miserable. Even if you don't face this vigilante justice, you may get in trouble for system intrusion or fraud (a criminal offense). Remember that you can't send spam without breaking rules; almost all spamming involves at least theft of resources.
Don't get used by big-time spammers. Don't sign up to do their dirty work for them; you will take the fall, and come out with nothing except hurt.
Alan Ralsky