Ask Slashdot: What To Do With Spammers You Know?

courteaudotbiz writes "For years, a business named Compu-Finder has been sending spam all around the province of Quebec, Canada. In their emails, there is a phone number where we can reach them, and an unsubscribe link that you can click and seems to work, but even after asking them on the phone, by email or with their unsubscribe link, to unsubscribe me, I still receive 10 — 15 spams a week coming from this company. Many bloggers, journalists and radio chroniclers talked about them, but they seem to be untouchable. Still, it is easy to find the names, addresses and phone numbers of the shareholders and administrators of the company. How can we, collectively, take action to make them understand that we do not like their mass mailing practice?"

Comments

Getting your point across

[jdavidb]

How can we, collectively, take action to make them understand that we do not like their mass mailing practice?

Are you under the impression that spam continues because people think we like it? That if they only understood how much we don't like it, they would stop?

Don't call or unsubscribe

[gearloos]

Usually having a phone number is great!... for the spammers. It now gives them another reference for you and more info to sell and abuse. as for unsubscribing, well, that just shows them that a live human actually is at that address and reading email from spammers.. Goldstrike if you called and unsubscribed.

Re:Don't call or unsubscribe

[bzipitidoo]

Why was this modded down? It's all too true. Don't unsubscribe, don't call. All that does is confirm that you look at their spam. Mark the offending messages as spam, and filter them out, that's all.

Re:Don't call or unsubscribe

[Half-pint HAL]

as for unsubscribing, well, that just shows them that a live human actually is at that address and reading email from spammers.. Goldstrike if you called and unsubscribed.

If they use the unsubscribe link in order to actively maintain you on their list, that smells like fraud to me.

Remember that something doesn't have to be in direct contravention of your country's Data Protection Act (or equivalent) to be spam -- contract law still holds, and if they offer a way to unsubscribe, you take it and they don't unsubscribe you, that's a breach of agreed terms.

Block it and move on

[Lev13than]

Just block their domain and get on with your life. If you value your time at, say, $20/hr, how much are you willing to spend in order to get nothing in return?

Re:Block it and move on

[houghi]

If all you are interested in is money, then indeed the best thing is to do nothing. If however you value other things, then the return might be worth it.

Not everything can be easily calculated in an amount of dollars.

why not help others?

[Onymous Coward]

At first glance we see this is the personally efficient way to handle the situation. Block their mail and move on. But then we might wonder if we're being a little selfish, not engaging our computer skills to help out others, the many others who are negatively affected by this spam. A little altruism is generally recognized as a noble thing...

This could lead us to thinking about the systems that have been developed for reporting spam, how individuals have been empowered to spend little effort in reporting, and how, when summed, that individually trivial effort, of thousands and thousands of people, collectively makes powerful anti-spam effect.

Then maybe we complete the circle, realizing that we are the beneficiaries of these powerful anti-spam systems, that our time is greatly saved by these systems, and that we are not just being altruistic in our contributions, we are helping ourselves.

The personally efficient way to handle many things is this way, being helpful to the larger community that you are by nature a member of, and personally capitalizing on the beneficial effects of the economies of scale and other mass dynamics/synergistic effects.

This is where selfishness meets altruism. So, why not help others, when you are really helping yourself?