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

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.

First Hand Experience...

[what2123]

I can speak on this company from a first hand account. I work for an ESP, I actually manage all our mail servers and work closely with ISPs and mail vendors to help out GOOD CLIENTS. I say this because Compu-Finder (although they have an official name that is different) was a client of ours. They were a BAD-CLIENT. We have many tools that are in place to help our clients ensure that best practices are followed as well as easily available to contacts of the client, e.g opt-outs and suppressing those contacts from future emails. Compu-Finder did everything they could to get around built in mechanisms to keep "contacts" subscribed. Well Finally after battling with them on changing their practices we finally fired them. They are the kind of company that makes me cringe because I know there are real, legitimate, marketers out there that do use email to engage clients and keep them up-to-date but they are the ones that make it bad for any sender.

Re:Block it and move on

[Nanoda]

After all the spam I've gotten in the past ~15 years? If I found out there was a spammer in my own city, I'd be willing to spend at least a couple of evenings trying to shut them down.

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.