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."
in a country that wipes its ass with the consitition,geneva convention,kyoto,israel etc etc etc
anti-americansim is a rising trend globally and it isnt because we are jealous of your "freedom"
one in 19 of AOL users clicks the links
I would have thought that 18 out of 19 AOLosers users would click the links. Hell, they click everything else that comes up, including viruses in email.
It's to the point that if somebody wants me to work on their computer and they're an AOL user, I refuse and tell them why. It's not just because of AOL; it's just that anybody stupid enough to use AOL would let all kinds of crap (spyware, etc.) get installed on their systems. And if you uninstall anything, they scream and say, "I needed that!"
you karma whore!
Two points - first, spam doesn't really cost you money directly for 99% of the population. It might cost the ISP some effort and mark up your broadband costs a bit. So? It's a Pita, but it's not the driving cost behind a broadband connection. Somebody at the ISP has to look after this? So? Your 'paying' in your mailing costs (as directly as you pay to recieve spam) for somebody at the post office to stand there and jam garbage mail in your mailbox. There's no difference. Secondly, From the article: "At some level, the folks who are engaged in a business where they are sending out massive volumes that they couldn't possibly have the permission of all those recipients for, they know full well that they are not engaged in legitimate or responsible non-spamming activities," he said. "You don't typically come up with 60 million e-mail addresses through a permission-based process." So? Where's your gawd given write not to recieve email from someone just because you didn't sign up? It's apparently lost on most of the people here that the internet is a PUBLIC network. That means it's available to the entire public as it's available to you. Don't like it? don't sign on. Or set up spam filters. Or don't get an email account - that'd lower your ISP's costs wouldn't it? Of course, everyone really does in fact want to receive emails from other people, including commericial ones. They just want to decide after the fact which ones they like. Because email is both a public and international forum, legislation won't solve the problem (and despite my earlier factual comments, I'd like to decrease the 1000+ emails I get a day). The only way this will be corrected is if the community as a whole develops a standard of some sort that prevents spam. That's the way the entire internet works, from TCP/IP to HTML. So everyone who admins an email server, get together and put forth a standard. You don't prevent anyone from doing their own thing, you just don't recieve email(or spam) from those that don't follow the standard.
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