Spam Replacing Postal Junk Mail?

TheOtherChimeraTwin writes "I've been getting spam from mainstream companies that I do business with, which is odd because I didn't give those companies my email address. It is doubly strange because the address they are using is a special-purpose one that I wouldn't give out to any business. Apparently knotice.com ('Direct Digital Marketing Solutions') and postalconnect.net aka emsnetwork.net (an Equifax Marketing Service Product with the ironic name 'Permission!') are somehow collecting email addresses and connecting them with postal addresses, allowing companies to send email instead of postal mail. Has anyone else encountered this slimy practice or know how they are harvesting email addresses?"

Comments

Allow us to share your details with select partner

[Iyonesco]

The only way you get spam is if a) you give your email address to businesses or b) if you use a service like hotmail where spammers send emails to random addresses and record the ones that don't get returned.

Businesses and spammers can't magically conjure your email address out of thin air so the cause must be one of the above. You've either signed up for a service and not unchcked "allow us to share your details with select partners" or you're using a popular email service that spammers target. Given that you're getting emails from major companies it sounds more likely it's the first possibility.

I registered a domain and use that for my email address and I'm careful to read what I'm signing up for so I get absolutely no spam at all. My opinion of spam is the same as my opinion of viruses - if you ever get any it's your own fault.

Re:E-Stamps, the only way to reduce spam

[Helix150]

this is never going to happen.

The only reason email works worth a damn right now is because everybody's email server speaks SMTP. Sure, SMTP has its flaws (IE lack of authentication and security) but it does what it's supposed to do.
Requiring payment for e-mail would require significantly changing, or outright replacing, SMTP. This isn't going to happen, because any changes will never reach critical mass. There's always going to be a million companies with email servers that haven't been patched since 2002, not to mention that most of the Internet would be up in arms about paying for e-mail.

There have been attempts to make email more traceable, for example DomainKeys and SPF. But take SPF as an example- it requires only the smallest of changes to implement, and still a huge number of systems don't have or use it.

But to repost something I found on slashdot a few years ago...

Your post advocates a

(*) technical ( ) legislative (*) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(*) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(*) Users of email will not put up with it
(*) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(*) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(*) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(*) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(*) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(*) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(*) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(*) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermo