Slashdot Mirror
A Day In The Life Of A Spammer
kaip writes "Internetnews.com has a story of a spammer. The individual sends 60 million spam emails for four days worth of work and claims that one in 19 of AOL users clicks the links in his mortgage spam (this number should however be taken with a grain of salt, see rules 1 and 2). Maybe not
everybody has heard of the Boulder
Pledge... The article also tells how the CAN-SPAM Act,
which legalises spamming, is turning the US into the spam haven of the world. Currently, 86 percent of the total spam volume is coming from the States."
I thought everyone on Slashdot hated the RIAA, the MPAA, and Microsoft. Why do you keep hyping CDs, movies, and Windows games?
Big corporations are what they are. They sell us cool stuff with one hand and tighten the screws on our freedoms with the other. We hate them every morning and love them every afternoon, and vice versa. This is part of living in the modern world: you take your yin with your yang and try to figure out how to do what's right the best you can. If you think it has to be all one way or the other, that's cool, share your opinions, but don't expect everyone else to think the same.
In short, there are some advertiser communications that we don't welcome into our lives and call "spam", while there are other advertiser communications that we invite into our lives when we go through the Sunday Newspaper looking for the ad circular from our favorite store so we can see what's on sale without having to go there.
Wording a rule set so that spam gets shut down but ads we want to see still get through is quite a tough task to do on a one-viewer basis. It becomes even more difficult to do that on a comminity basis. Some of us want to know what's on sale this week at Best Buy, others couldn't care less.
I just don't see a solution that pleases everybody being possible in this area. It'll always be a game of new regulations constantly going up, but only being effective until somebody finds a way to work around them. We can hate spammers as scum, but that seems like the worst we can do to them at times.
There are some things the US Government is just plain contradictory on because, well, We the People are contradictory on the topic.
We shout out that we have the First Amendment rights anytime somebody tries to tell us not to speak, but then we strugle to find a way to make other people we don't want to hear shut up. The fact is, anywhere you create an unregulated communication medium, the smut, scum, and scam people will definitely show up to play. It's just the way things work.
This is more proof of why Spamhaus called CAN-SPAM the "National Right to Spam Act."
Blech. Shoot 'em all.
On page one of the article:
And on page two:
If he ain't scared, why hide behind a false name?
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...
Not american, but still... Yes, free speech. Everyone's entitled to free speech. Everyone's also entitled to not listening if they don't want to - and for me, this is where spam crosses the line. The mere fact that you have to go through so much pain to keep your e-mail box spam free is indicator of how annoying these people can get in order to FORCE you to read their advertisements.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
SPAM will continue to exist until people stop making spam profitable.
SPAM will continue as long as spammers percieve that spam is profitable.
I have never read an article where a spammer actually gave solid documentation of how much money he or she made. I've always read that "for a successful campaign, I get between this much and that much on a sales rate of this much or that much on a click through rate of about this on a distribution of about that."
Sending spam is a get-rich-quick scheme, and the people participating lie about how much money they make, just like every other stooge in every other get-rich-quick scheme. Spam will continue to exist as long as shitheads who live in trailers with high-interest credit cards will agree to "spend money to make money" by buying scam email proxy servers and scam bulk email software.
That's unnecessarily defeatist. Spam will always exist as long as it's profitable, as you say. Laws and tech can both raise the cost of spam or, equivalently, decrease its effectiveness. Imagine if all email programs came with a default-on advanced spam filter, and you had to go through hoops and hurdles to turn it off. How many people would choose to receive spam, even among those who (in my opinion, assininely) click through on the spam they receive?
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
That's all well and good, but do you have any idea how many false positives that system has generated over the last year or two? I'm curious, because it sounds like it would reject a lot of list mail and "cold" contacts from people asking for help with stuff (which is something I'm happy to answer when I have the time).
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
While your techniques will all stop spam, they will also stop a great deal of legitimate mail (ham). Stopping spam is not the hard problem Stopping spam while letting ham through is the hard problem.
If businesses did what you did, most of them would go out-of-business.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I think many people aren't quite clear on the first amendment. It says roughly that we have the right to say what we want. However, it does not say that we can force people to listen or that we have any right to be heardd.
It should be noted, before I say anything else, that corperate speech does not fall under free speech. General unsolicited email might be covered under the first amendment, but spam advertizing something business related isn't.
Additionally, sometimes what people consider free speech crosses over into things which are illegal. You can tell something, but if you follow them around and continue telling them, that could be considered harassment. You can put up a protest, but if you threaten people or indimidate others or keep people from getting to work or cause a large disturbance or many other things, you're protest has crossed the line of what is legal.
The point is that you can say whatever you want when it doesn't affect anybody else, but we don't live in a vacum and your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.
The actions of spammers are destructive and cost people time and money, even if you ignore fraudulent spam. To say that it should be legal by first amendment is to ignore much of the issue.